The coronavirus outbreak has impacted businesses worldwide, affecting millions of people with a growing impact on the global economy. No one knows how severe the imminent economic downturn is or for how long it might last.
Surviving is a major challenge during this lockdown. B2B marketers that we are having conversations with are planning, developing, and executing webinar promotion strategies for the coming weeks of social distancing.
People all over the world can learn something from your automated webinar. Whether it is a live or on-demand session, marketing your webinars to drive demand and to make sure they are successful even during this critical time is important. And they ought to be, because everybody's home, so the odds are in your favor. They will be open to consume anything that resonates with their business strategies and help them learn how to overcome their major pain points.
There are numerous options that can be a part of your marketing strategy like a facebook ad or even different campaigns on your social media platforms. To give you gist, let's quickly run you through the key webinar promotion strategies that will positively affect your webinar marketing activities and derive the desired returns.
Role of a Landing Page
After taking the time to contact potential speakers, setting up the logistics and drafting the content, the first thing to do before you start promoting your webinar is creating a neat and clean, optimized landing page on the website for all your visitors. This page will make an impact on visitors if they are able to find webinar-related information easily. Here are some of the essentials to give an excellent digital experience to your audience through your make your webinar landing page
- Provide sufficient information about what your webinar covers and what your audience will get from it, how will they benefit from it as well as few takeaways
- Mention date and worldwide time zones and the webinar platform
- Name the speakers of your live webinar with their details
- A form to fill and get details of registered users
Remember, you have to make your webinar successful right from the beginning. So, do not leave any loophole that will prompt your webinar registrants to leave.
Once they register, the next thing you have to do is send a thank you message. For this, you can create a separate thank you page or send an SMS or email with all the final details again. Doing this will allow them to make sure that the webinar registration process is complete and if you're up for it, allow them to ask any queries. This will send them the message that you care about what they get from your paid webinar and it increases their chance of attending.
After giving online direction to the attendees, let's move towards some super-effective tactics of webinar marketing.
As a marketer, when should you start promoting your webinar? Some like to start a week before the webinar date, and others start two weeks ahead. The difference is, it gives you time to test and pivot if needed. Once you host a few webinars, you'll gain better insights into how quickly it takes to reach your prospective registrants, and you can increase or decrease your promotion time to what makes sense. As per research, the best days for sending invitations for a webinar presentation are Tuesdays and Wednesdays owing to the better open and conversion rates on these days.
Hello Bar
Making people spend more time on the website and allowing them to discover what they want through your offering is always a challenge for marketers. One of the tools that can be a part of your webinar marketing strategy is Hello Bar which helps convert visitors into customers. It's actually a plug-in that can be placed at the top or bottom of your page to grab the attention of people. You can write one or two sentences that can lead your audience to link to the landing page or wherever you want your visitors to land with a call-to-action button. Many marketers have seen favorable results. You can try this out to see how your lead generation attempts are affected by it.
Exit Overlays
Exit overlays are one of the best webinar marketing tools that can help you retain online visitors. It tracks the movement of the cursor and is displayed when the users try to navigate away from the page and tries to convince them to stay. The message displayed to users can be customized and gives them a chance to read what you're offering, in turn converting them into attendees for the webinar. Make sure you set up the pop-up on the relevant page, where it makes sense for visitors to take the necessary action. There is a lot to explore about exit-intent pop-ups but make sure it does not interfere with user experience.
Advertise on Your Own Properties
Promoting webinars on your own properties is cost-free. You can use a marketing tool like a permanent page to post about all upcoming events or a future webinar that you are planning to organize. This is a one-time activity where you can regularly update your scheduled webinars. You can put banner ads on your homepage. This is a great way to keep dynamic content on your page.
Using a blog post to promote an upcoming webinar is another great idea to drive more people online. Include a link to a landing page where they can register for the webinar. You can also make a teaser video about your event and share it across all social media platforms.
Emails for Webinars
Emails play a significant role in webinar marketing. It is the primary channel for most webinars right from the beginning to capture more viewers and increase conversions. Also, you can create an email signature which contains a link to the landing page. If you are sending emails to a large database then this can be considered as a great content marketing strategy.
Here are two awesome blogs that you can read, one of them is a step-by-step guide for webinar promotions through emails and the other one tells you how to convert webinar leads into sales pipeline using the BDA strategy.
Collaborating with a Big Brand or Influencer
Teaming up with a renowned brand or influencers can give you a lot of exposure and add value to your audience, increasing your market reach and credibility. Partnering should be done such that it is easy for your collaborator to promote it. This collaboration is worth the time and effort if you prepare for it precisely.
Though this combination has a huge potential of benefiting your marketing plan, it's not easy to make it successful. Here is something about webinars and influencers that light up your path.
Involve Your Employees
According to LinkedIn reports, employees have 10x more connections compared to company followers. So get your employees involved in the marketing webinar process as they are actually one of the greatest assets when spreading the word among the target audience in your webinar funnel. The exposure of employees' network will be worth it. Provide a social copy and link to them so that they can share and make the best of it.
Listing on Webinar Sites and Personalized Invites
You'll find plenty of webinar listing sites available out there to promote your webinar. Some of them can be free and some paid. Find the best one that is suitable for your webinar and drive more webinar attendees.
To send personalized webinars, you can sit with your sales team and draft amazing personalized messages containing a gist of your webinar content to send invitations for key accounts. Your prospects will appreciate it and end up in increasing your webinar attendance.
Following these tactics will make your webinar marketing way better. Throughout the journey, just remember to keep your audience in mind and plan everything accordingly. Deck 7's marketing team provides a comprehensive solution for promoting your webinars to your target audience.