Has this ever happened to you where you had a webinar and nobody showed up, you were just doing a live webinar by yourself?
It’s not the greatest feeling in the world especially when you put all that time and effort into it.
Making webinar marketing a part of your content marketing and video marketing strategy is almost a no-brainer today. A webinar presentation in the past was an easy ticket to creating a webinar funnel that flows directly in to sales. Selling it was one of the best ways to make money with high-ticket items, a decade ago. Now webinar marketing strategy has become a cornerstone of lead generation strategy and people are burnt out on them.
According to the B2B Content Marketing 2017 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report, 58% of B2B organizations use webinars, and one out of three respondents named it the most critical tactic for content marketing success.
77% of B2B marketers are using educational content to nurture their audiences. Moreover, 64% of B2B marketers are using audio and visual content, which includes videos and webinars. - Content Marketing Institute (CMI)
If you decide to be a webinar host, you can get more traffic, leads, and eventually fill up your sales funnel. Once you've chosen a webinar platform, decided whether you are doing an automated webinar or evergreen webinar, and identified how your upcoming webinar fits into your content strategy you might think you are all set. But, how do we get people to pay more attention to our webinars? The customer journey is only beginning with your sales webinar. The right webinar tool and webinar content can only get you so far to getting as many webinar registrants as possible.
What do we do to ensure people show up?
The answer is a DEVOTION to PROMOTION. As a marketer, you should have good webinar promotion etiquette to increase webinar attendance.
With this in mind, we’ll lay out some pointers to promote effective B2B webinars on 3 main social media channels for maximal impact:
LinkedIn is one of the greatest places to promote your B2B webinars, as it is tailored to specific professional segments. Make sure not to overdo it on this platform, promote the webinar 1-2 times in a week. Always remember the best days for improving webinar registration are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. So, let’s begin the fun game:
- Post the webinar link on your company website. Anyone who follows your company page will see this post and might tune in.
- Promote your webinar on your LinkedIn groups. If you have not joined any, join one. Promote webinars that are relevant to the group you are joining to avoid 'spamming' other group members. It is one of the most effective ways to reach out to the new audience.
- Encourage your colleagues to 'like' or 'share' your company's LinkedIn post. This is a simple yet effective tactic of webinar marketing and can attract a handful of engaged viewers who might not have known about your webinar.
- LinkedIn allows companies and individuals to buy sponsored ads. You can target them toward certain job titles, industries, and company locations. Use your webinar marketing budget efficiently to target only those who are more likely to be interested in your topic.
- Share multiple and relevant content pieces around a common topic in the form of a blog post, article, infographic, or video content to make noise around your webinar. Make sure to publish it directly on LinkedIn and other social media channels. Doing this can keep your readers interested in your webinar, also provide a registration link to the webinar on your posts.
Facebook marketing can help you get prospects over the presentation. It can help you cast a wider audience net and increase registrations. Here’s is how we can get our hands-on Facebook promotions:
- Take advantage of one of the Facebook features called Facebook events. This feature will allow you to publish the landing page of your webinar, so you can use that as the location and send out invites.
- Create a Facebook Ad, an ideal strategy to promote your webinar among the largest audience - to reach the right people at the right time. Features such as Custom and Lookalike audiences enable you to distinguish ad reach between different demographics.
- The higher the engagement ratio you have with your Facebook audience, the more likely they are going to share your webinar with their social network. You just have to add social proof to your webinar and promote it on Facebook. For example, getting sponsorship for the webinar. Social media audiences are likely to spread the word about the webinar when they know it is being sponsored by any reputable organization.
Promotion, socialization, entertainment, sharing, whatever be the reason, all enjoy communicating with the world via the 280-character message. Twitter has become everyone’s go-to social media channel. In the business sphere, Twitter is a widespread marketing channel with both business-to-business marketers as well as business to consumer. Here’s some of the best twitter lingo for your webinar promotions:
- Twitter limits your post to 280 characters, but adding a picture to your post will put more information into one single message. Create a twitter-friendly image because a message with a proper image is more noticeable in the social network feed.
- Your objective is to grow as many attendees for your webinar as possible. So, add links to your tweets to direct the users where they could register for your webinar or watch it live.
- Make more and more use of the Twitter Advertising platform. Twitter advertising is super flexible and gives options to target by demographics, keywords, behaviors, interests, and even display your ad to people following the most relevant media sources.
- For attracting the attention of new users, make use of the well-known hashtags or you can also invent a special hashtag for your webinar: #Webinar or #MarketingWebinars. Use Twitter Advanced Search to search around keywords to accomplish the same thing.
Webinar software hasn't changed too much in the last few years, but online promotion and webinar marketing strategies have. As of now, we have shown you how to promote your webinars on social media through Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn advertising. While these are powerful in terms of promoting a live webinar to its intended audience, there are also many other ways you can promote your free or paid webinar. These tools are especially helpful if you had a successful webinar and want to give your audience access to your webinar recording. Next, in this article, we are also going to share 5 simple yet effective webinar marketing tips for social media. Let’s dive in:
1. Promote Your Webinar with a Different Mindset
Promoting a webinar is pretty different from promoting any other lead magnet. It’s a one- time, usually live event. This is a key element to keep in mind while creating a webinar marketing strategy.
2. Design an Effective and Engaging Landing Page
The exclusivity of the event is the key selling button. Your landing page is the first test of all your webinar marketing effort. So, you should create a landing page that compliments the richness of your webinar. Your landing page should also have a form to collect basic contact information such as an email address and name. In addition to optimizing it for conversion, tease the potential webinar attendees with all the important topics you'll cover in the webinar. Having a teaser video on your landing page can help you engage your audience without boring them and is helpful in carrying your webinar marketing strategy forward.
3. Optimize Your Landing Page for Social Sharing
Adding social sharing buttons on your webinar landing page can have a significant impact on the actions of people who visit your site. Your content will gain maximum shares if it allows people for easy posting on their own social media pages. So, do attach social sharing buttons with your content let it be a blog, an article or any other webinar marketing announcement. Also, make sure to add a call-to-action (CTA) to guide them towards the next process in your marketing plan.
4. Add Effective and Trending Hashtags
Hashtags have become an effective marketing tool and can be used well within your webinar strategy. Adding hashtags to your post can strengthen your presence and content on social platforms. So, creating a hashtag for your marketing webinar and using it in all your online promotional material is a great move. Your content with a hashtag is enough to create a solid impression in the minds of your future webinar attendees.
5. Study as Much as You Can about Your Target Audience
Determining the actual problem of your audience is the first step in solving their problems. Study as much as you can about your audience. Answer questions like, will your slide deck act as a problem solver for them? Can they practically apply the provided information in their professional life? Your topic and your content are the major keys to convince your potential customers to sign up for the webinar.
This is how you promote your webinar on and with social channels to create a digital experience for your audience. For more tips and everything, you need to know about social media marketing and webinar marketing strategy, connect with a dedicated Deck 7 social media specialist today. All the best!