Webinars can help you find potential clients, increase brand awareness, and generate leads. However, webinars require thorough planning and active promotion to get good results.
Best Ways To Promote Webinar Or Web Conference
This article offer a list of 34 webinar promotion tools to help you advertise webinars and gather as many registrations as possible.
Tools list
Doing this helps to ensure that you get the best results from your webinars. This is important because you want to get the best possible return on your investment in time and money.
Newsletters
👉 Email campaign
An email campaign is one of the most effective ways of promoting a webinar. People that have left you their emails have interacted with you at least once. They might have attended previous webinars, subscribed to blogs, or downloaded materials. So, they are sure to be more willing to register for webinars than those who do not know you.
However, it’s a bad idea to buy subscribers’ databases. If you do this, your email campaign is targeting people that have never subscribed to your service. This results in your emails being treated as spam and does provide any real growth.
👉 Email signature
Be sure to add information about your webinar to your email signature. It could contain a webinar name, a link to the registration page, or some appealing offer. This way, you will inform people about your webinar in a non-intrusive manner.
They will be receiving your email anyway, so they will not regard you as being too pushy. If your email content is valuable to them, they are likely to see your webinar as something that may be of interest to them.
Website & Landing Pages
👉 Landing page
Arrange a separate landing page where people can read your webinar announcement and register for the event. Place the primary information about the upcoming event on this page including presenters, questions to be discussed, and details of the useful information that attendees will learn. You should also include details of any related offers.
Image Source: jfrog.com
You may also want to add the presenter’s photo to this page, along with a video invitation or other visual elements. They will help draw the attention of users and increase the effectiveness of the page.
👉 Registration form
A registration form can also significantly increase the number of registrations for your webinar. Make your registration form look minimalistic: just a name and email. If you prefer to have more fields, let them be non-obligatory. If a user needs to fill out many obligatory fields, they are likely to close the page and give up on the registration.
Image Source: intercom.com
Moreover, you can always collect additional information about users during the webinar via chats and polls. You do not need to have this information upfront. Once a user is getting the benefit of your webinar, they are more likely to be happy to provide additional information.
👉 Website
Add information about webinars to your site. If webinars are recurrent, devote a special block to them. Thus, regular visitors will be able to find the latest information about the events quickly and easily. This makes it more likely that they will sign up for your webinars regularly.
Image source: semrush.com
You may also want to include recordings of your previous webinars in this section. This helps visitors to your website to see the quality they can expect. It also helps to increase overall viewer numbers for your webinars.
👉 Pop-ups
A pop-up is a controversial but effective way of promoting a webinar. If you need to inform as many people as possible about your webinar, you can use pop-ups. However, you need to remember that this form of promotion can be irritating to some people.
For it not to irritate users, show it once a session, and offer a possibility to close it. This means that you benefit from the user seeing it, but it’s not annoying enough to be more off-putting than promotional.
👉 Tooltip
A tooltip appears on a website page when a user interacts with a particular element of the page. It can be used to draw attention to your webinar when a user hovers over an element of the page relevant to the website topic.
Do not overload tooltips with information: indicate the webinar name and add a call to action. Be sure to offer a possibility to close the tooltip. It’s also worth noting that pop-ups and tooltips should not be used as this is likely to be irritating for the user.
👉 Blog post
There are two options when it comes to using a blog post to promote your webinar. You can write a blog post devoted to the webinar topic and invite everyone to attend the event at the end of the post. Alternatively, you can write a post about the webinar itself.
The first option is likely to bring the best results. This is because people will see the post as helpful and want to know more. So, they will want to register for the webinar. On the other hand, if you write about the webinar, people may see this as merely a promotional gimmick and maybe put off attending.
👉 Interview with speaker
Ask the presenter several questions and publish their answers on your blog. Interviews can generate more views and shares than a simple post. This also gives people who are thinking of attending an insight into what the experience will be like.
If you do this in the right way, you should make people want to register. To do this, you should give them a taste and leave them wanting to know more.
Social networks
Use any social networks where you maintain groups or personal pages. Do not limit them to Facebook or Twitter only. For example, if you have a LinkedIn account or one in other social networks, use them too. The more exposure you get, the better, as social media has proven to be a useful webinar promotion tool.
When you are using your social networks, certain things are useful to know. Let’s take a closer look at this valuable information.
Place information about the webinar on your personal page and your business page.
👉 Event page creation
Facebook also allows for creating a dedicated event page. To do so, locate “Events” in the left menu column and click on it. Press “Create Event.”
Image source: facebook.com
Select the event type (public or private) and indicate the primary information about the webinar. After this is done, start inviting friends to the page.
👉 Event page promotion
Users that indicate their interest in the event will receive a notification from Facebook on the event’s date. This will ensure that visitors not only register for the webinar but attend it. You can also always remind your subscribers of the upcoming event via post updates, videos, photos, etc. Just make sure to keep all the information relevant and avoid spam.
If you’ve got a company page (and you should), list all the upcoming events there, right at the top. This is how you make sure your loyal subscribers don’t miss the event, and random visitors find out about it in the first place.
Do not forget to use retargeting to lure those who’ve bounced off your event page. Such ads are highly effective since people are already familiar with the webinar — they need one last push.
If you have co-hosts, ask them to cross-promote the event. Even if your co-hosts do not have a big following, their subscribers may. And for beginner webinar creators, every little bit helps.
Facebook has got some amazing advertising tools that allow you to narrow down your potential audience based on various factors. However, it’s essential to be careful here and do some thorough research beforehand.
LinkedIn is a social network intended for business communication and finding useful contacts. If you have a LinkedIn account, create a post about your webinar and share it with your contacts.
Image source: LinkedIn.com
Join a LinkedIn group relevant to your webinar topic and share your content there. If there is no group like that, don’t hesitate to create your own.
It’s also a good idea to write an article for a LinkedIn blog with a link to your webinar. Do not hesitate to use video excerpts and feedback from previous events: the more evidence you provide, the better reception you will get.
Consider investing in sponsored posts and InMail. LinkedIn paid advertising is great since it allows you to target people according to their industry and career.
While you can do it on Facebook as well, not everybody mentions their job title there. Therefore, you have a higher chance of reaching the right people on LinkedIn.
Twitter is a social network where posts (tweets) that people publish cannot exceed 280 characters. Major event information can hardly be cut into such a small text. So, write only about the main things, and shorten the link. For your tweet to stand out from other messages, add a picture and hashtags to it.
Hashtags are important for all social networks, but they are crucial for webinar promotion on Twitter. Make sure you and everybody promoting your event use them in every post.
Keep a hashtag short, fun, and relevant. Doing this will attract more people to your webinar and encourage them to use the hashtag in their re-tweets.
Because Twitter posts are so short, you really need to focus on delivering the most important info in just a few lines. A user scrolling through their feed must immediately understand what your webinar is all about, when it takes place, and who the presenters will be.
It’s best to provide a link to a landing page where people can find more details about the event.
Instagram is a social network for publishing photos and videos. If you are an Instagram user, tell your subscribers about the webinar.
Image source: instagram.com
Since Instagram content is highly visual, you really need to focus on making your photos look as professional and authentic as you can. The latter is especially important since people are often averse to companies using stock images.
If you don’t have money for an expensive camera, you may want to focus on Instagram Stories and sharing your excitement through short videos.
It’s a good idea to encourage other members of your webinar team to do the same since this humanizes your brand and makes it look more trustworthy.
Just like with Twitter, it’s crucial to ensure your entire account, along with the registration and payment pages, is mobile friendly. Otherwise, you will miss out on a lot of potential webinar participants.
YouTube
YouTube is a great webinar promotion tool that can help you get subscribers continuously throughout the year.
Firstly, you can shoot a short video invitation to the webinar and upload it to the platform. You can add the video to the webinar registration page and other social networks.
You may also pay creators with similar content to promote your event. If you’ve got some following yourself, it’s a good idea to strike a cross-marketing agreement.
However, even if you do not have many subscribers, you can still offer some non-monetary value, such as an expert interview in return for their promotion.
Ask creators to review your content and share their experiences. The more personal their experience is, the more people will see your webinar as something worth viewing.
It’s best to use YouTube all year round to grow your audience. Create short videos relevant to your niche once or twice a week. These will position you as an expert and entice people into participating in your webinars to learn more.
Add short video teasers before the webinar to build excitement and remind people of the event. Use key moments from previous webinars to give a taste of what’s to come.
YouTube is wonderful since it allows you to harness the most effective content today — video. It works beautifully in conjunction with webinars since they also represent video content.
Third-party platforms
👉 Press releases
A press release is a message for mass media about the upcoming event. You can talk about your webinar in a press release and publish it on special platforms like pr.com, preen.com, and prnewswire.com. Your press release can get online portals interested and accrue wide media coverage.
In order for it to work effectively, remember to keep your press release professional. It should be relevant and to the point while still containing all the relevant information that people need to attend your webinar.
👉 Guest posts
This method’s essence is as follows: you compose an article on the webinar topic and add a link to a webinar landing page; after that, you arrange to publish it on a third-party platform. For such an article to be published for free, it should be of good quality and useful.
It’s also worth noting that you should choose a relevant third-party platform to approach for publishing. For instance, if your webinar is about content marketing, choose a platform that is likely to attract people interested in that area.
👉 SlideShare
Slide Share is a platform for publishing keynotes. This website’s monthly attendance is high (over 60 million users). This is why it can be a useful tool for webinar promotion. Just prepare a webinar announcement in the form of a keynote and add it to Slide Share.
This may also be a good time to add some of your keynotes from previous webinars. This helps people to see you as a reputable brand that has something useful to say. They are, therefore, more likely to sign up for your webinars now and in the future.
👉 Blogging platforms
Every sphere has got Internet communities where thematic articles and other information can be published. For marketers, an example of such a resource could be marketingprofs.com, while travelers prefer lonelyplanet.com, and so on.
How can these platforms be used for promoting webinars? You could publish a post related to the webinar topic and provide a link to more detailed materials from your blog at the end of the post. This is a great way of building interest in your webinar as a reliable source of valuable information.
Event Scheduling Websites
There are platforms where you could place an announcement of your webinar free of charge. After registration at such websites, you create a special page devoted to your event. Users register for the webinar on the platform and do not go to other websites. This is extremely helpful if you do not have the time or resources to create targeted landing pages for your webinars. Examples of sites that you can use are.
👉 Eventbrite
Eventbrite is a popular service that allows you to sell tickets online for your paid event. It is also suitable for promoting free webinars. The platform promises to promote your webinar via numerous social sharing tools and deliver sales reports in real-time. You can even schedule a chat with the company expert to learn more about event scheduling and promotion.
👉 Eventzilla
Eventzilla allows you to create a beautiful registration page for your event that you can embed almost anywhere: Facebook, your blog, website, etc. The platform can help you make an entire website or app dedicated just to your webinar. When using Eventzilla, your potential participants have various payment options at their disposal: credit/debit cards, bank transfer, invoice, etc. This is important if you plan on having a diverse pool of attendees since payment preferences differ from country to country.
The platform is highly customizable and can be tailored to the needs of every individual organizer. This means that even if Eventzilla does not work with your favorite webinar service, you may still use their API to do custom integration.
People
It is worth noting that you should not just use professional services and advertising for webinar promotion. People, e.g., your partners, colleagues, and subscribers, can bring you good results too, through their different networks.
Each of these networks can give you access to numerous new leads. So, it would be best to ask all the relevant people you know to spread the word about your webinar and how beneficial attendance will be.
👉 Guest speaker
If you have invited a professional as a guest to your webinar, kindly ask the person to help you in promoting the event. They should be more than willing to tell their network of contacts about the event. After all, doing so also helps to promote their own expertise.
When you have the initial conversation with them, make sure to emphasize your webinar’s content and the results you are trying to achieve. This helps to ensure that they approach only their relevant contacts about attending.
👉 Colleagues
Ask your colleagues to share the webinar announcement on social networks. Doing this means that they reach friends who might be interested in attending. This gives you a much wider area of reach than you would have with just your own friends and contacts on social networks.
When you do this, you must attract the right audience. Therefore, make sure that you approach the right colleagues and promote your webinar to appropriate friends.
👉 Client support managers
If your company offers phone or online support, ask its managers to invite loyal clients to your webinars. This gives you access to many more potential leads as support is generally provided to significant people.
However, you need to be careful when using this form of promotion. People need to feel as though they are being told about something of value to them and not simply being subjected to pressure sales techniques.
👉 Partners
Ask your partners to recommend your webinar in their mailing campaign and social networks. In return, publish information about partners on the registration page and talk about them during your webinar.
Remember that this works best if your partners have some relevance to your webinar. Otherwise, if you start talking about them during your webinar, it can seem too promotional and sales-focused.
👉 Opinion leaders
Every professional community has got opinion leaders, i.e., people with the largest number of subscribers able to influence the audience’s opinion. Find opinion leaders in your sphere and reach an agreement with them on promoting your webinar.
For instance, they may have some interesting and relevant content that you can promote to attendees. They may even want to speak during your webinar. This is fine as long as it’s relevant and does not detract from your webinar’s standard.
👉 Registration for repost
You can make it not to register for your webinar unless they talk about it on their social media pages. This type of registration for repost will allow you to receive more shares and broader exposure.
Do not forget that there will be people who will not register for the webinar because of this. So, you need to weigh the potential benefits up against the potential pitfalls.
👉 Journalists
You may want to connect with journalists involved with specialized mass media (national mass media will not be interested in a webinar, especially if it has nothing extraordinary about it). These journalists may be interested in featuring your webinar, especially if there is a local interest aspect to it.
Many local media providers also have websites. You may be able to use these websites to publish information about your webinar.
Paid sources
If you have no subscribers’ database, significant partners, or social network activity, paid promotion services may become your best choice. You can search for providers online.
Remember that you do not want to waste money on promotional activities that do not produce significant results. So, you need to do some research and set a realistic budget.
👉 Google Ads
Google Ads is a contextual advertising system by Google Ads offers customized advertising in search and context media networks.
If you already have an Ads account, you can create a campaign specifically to promote your webinar. If you do not have an account, you may want to look at using Ads in a wider context and for webinar promotion.
👉 Video advertisement on YouTube
Though ads on YouTube are adjusted via Google Ads, they have their own specific value and deserve a separate mention.
Video ads are shown to users when they watch YouTube videos. Unlike context ads, here, you will have to play not for clicks but ad views. You can target your video ads to an audience with specific interests and demographic characteristics.
👉 Facebook Ads
Targeted advertisements on Facebook are shown in news feeds and the block to the newsfeed’s right. You can target your ads using very specific filters, which makes them more relevant.
Remember that your ads need to be engaging and specific. There is no value in paying for advertising that does not serve to attract people to your webinars.
👉 Retargeting
Advertisement networks like Google Ads and Facebook offer retargeting customization. Retargeting campaigns involve ads for users that have visited your event’s website page but have not registered for the event.
Retargeting is a useful tool, which allows you to bring users back to the event. Moreover, the per-click price is lower than that of context ads.
👉 Ads on Twitter
Place your ads on Twitter and assess their effectiveness. It might be the case that Twitter could be more effective for your topic than other social media platforms like Facebook.
Once you have placed your ads, you can use analytics tools to check how successful they are. If success is limited, you may want to tweak the ads or concentrate on a different social network.
👉 Ads on Instagram
Instagram offers ads as pictures and stories. Announcements are shown in the news feed with the Ads sign. This visual approach may be the best way to attract a certain audience.
This is especially likely to be the case if your webinar’s content has a visual aspect to it. For instance, you may be talking about developments in video marketing.
Conclusion
Using at least half of these suggested promotional tools will help you increase the audience numbers for your webinars. Not all tools offer the same level of effectiveness. Some of them may bring you numerous registrations, while others may contribute one or two only. So, try different tools, monitor their effectiveness, and select those that best suit your needs.
Some free ways to promote your webinar include: sharing it on social media platforms, emailing your subscribers, reaching out to relevant Facebook and LinkedIn groups, collaborating with other businesses or influencers in your industry, creating a blog post about your webinar, and optimizing your website for search engines.
Yes, you can use paid advertising to promote your webinar, but this can be expensive. Instead, try to focus on free promotional methods first. If you do decide to use paid advertising, consider targeting specific demographics, using retargeting ads, and monitoring your ad spend to ensure you’re getting a positive return on investment.
An expert behind the simplified online meeting and webinar software platform, MyOwnConference. In today’s flexible work environment, Dan offers invaluable life hacks, in-depth reviews, and savvy tips for organizing, promoting, and excelling in virtual conferences and webinars.
