People often make one common mistake when hosting a webinar. They aren’t aware of its importance to the whole content marketing strategy, and thus they don’t pay enough attention to planning it (if they even do so at all). Actually, a complex vision of the promotion can make or break a webinar when it comes to its final success. Let’s be honest - most of us don’t dedicate our time to run a video free-of-charge, and the real purpose of hosting one is to boost sales. If we focus on that goal, a webinar has to play an essential role in the marketing strategy. It should become an integral part of it, as that’s the only way to generate more leads.
No wonder that sometimes there’s a dispute between marketers who praise the worth of webinars and salespeople who are more sceptical about hosting them. That’s because, without a complex idea and plan, nothing will make you profit unless you happen to be a golden boy or just get very lucky.
Thankfully we have your back, so we’ve gathered together the most common questions and the best practices to follow. Stay with us and meet webinar best practices.
The three “W”s to ask yourself before planning webinar promotion
#1 Who is in your target audience?
Before you make a webinar, you have to be sure who you are speaking to. Knowing your audience is vital for building a strategy that will hit the jackpot. To reach the right people, you should really think about the target group of your product or service.
You probably already have examples of your marketing personas, so it’s high time to go back to them, analyse their primary attributes and include them to your webinar best practices. By knowing characteristics such as their ages, genders and the places they live (urban, countryside, or even a specific city if you run a local business), then you can target your potential customers precisely. This will influence the rest of the strategy and, ultimately, your sales.
You can also think about the virtual sites on which your leads spend their time. This is an important metric, since according to research people generally spend over 3 hours on their phones per day. It sounds like a lot, but it’s nothing compared to Millennials who use their mobiles for as much as 5.7 hours a day. Seems like the perfect moment to reach them, right? Well, this leads us nicely on to the next question.
#2 Where to find your target audience?
When you know who your potential clients are and what habits they have, let’s look at where you should concentrate your webinar promotion. Consider:
- Using what you already have. The contact base you’ve built is perfect to start with because it consists of people who were previously (and probably still are) interested in your services. Many of them might be “cold” leads, so your goal should be to re-engage them. You can send them an email asking about the content they would like to see. It’s a simple way of reminding them about your existence and restarting interaction simultaneously.
- Joining groups and pages on social media platforms concerning the topics connected with your business and the interests of your potential clients.
- Looking through other companies’ audiences to see what type of consumers they attract, in order to inspire your webinar marketing and get to know new groups.
- Being active on various social media platforms, from Facebook through Instagram comments to LinkedIn. If you’re in the computer games industry, you could think of specific places such as gaming platforms and communicators, for example.
- Reaching out to your audience with paid advertisements across social media and keyword research (but we’ll get to this later).
#3 What’s the best time to start and end webinar promotion?
You’re probably not going to like this answer, but here we go: it depends. If your target group are parents with small children, you might want to schedule a webinar for the afternoon, when the youngsters may take a nap. But at the same time might not suit people who work 8 hours a day and come home late. You could consider scheduling a webinar in the evening or midday on a weekend for them instead, depending on your customers’ preferences. As you see, when you create your own webinar best practices you need to think of your customers.
Sometimes asking for their opinion is a great way to announce your webinar before you even create an event. It’s also an excellent practice to increase your customer engagement. Consider making a poll on your Insta Story and asking the question via email.
Leverage your webinar marketing strategy with social media
Regular communication is an essential factor, yet driving organic traffic in 2020 is no longer enough. That’s why you should empower your webinar marketing with social media advertising and other useful tactics to make the most of your live videos - and to make an impact on our sales. Here are the webinar best practices to implement besides investing in paid promotion on social media.
#1 Create content that your audience needs
First and foremost, your webinar best practices have to be useful. The webinar has to concern topics for which there’s a demand within your audience. No one likes to waste time on watching irrelevant videos when they can dedicate it to their family or self-development. When your webinar covers a relevant topic and is peppered with insights, it’s likely to have a wider audience. If you already have some followers, you can ask them to choose what content they would prefer to see in order to serve their needs.
Remember that a video is just a part of your content strategy, and to make the most of it you should use special features to interact with your audience. For example, tools like LiveWebinar enable integration with Prezi and allow you to create polls or surveys within the platform. After a webinar, you can send the presentation to the participants to create a more involved experience that will be remembered.
#2 Keywords are the key to success
To figure out what is trending right now, you can search for keywords and topics connected with the business you’re running. It paints a bigger picture of your clients’ needs and shows you precisely what your target group is looking for, allowing you to find the sweet spot with the right content.
How to do this? It’s useful to get familiar with specific tools that show the ranking of content that has the best conversion rates. Performing such research is a powerful weapon that helps you build up your content around terms that are popular and thus concurs with your competitors. Although a webinar event doesn’t last long, you can choose specific phrases and weave them into your copy. If you back keywords that fit a particular niche, you’re more likely to break through the glass ceiling. Plus if you put your brand’s name into some keywords, you can start work on getting them to appear in rankings on search engines.
#3 The gold mines of social groups & spaces
Social media groups are like a natural habitat for some users. People who are members of particular spaces often seek valuable content, so they’re a perfect place to make webinar promotion and start buzz marketing.
If you don’t spam with your content and you’re a relatively engaged member of a group, your webinar promotion can come across naturally. Join a few groups where you can find leads that are genuinely likely to become your customers. What you’re looking for is future clients who would be interested in buying your product, rather than the need to track vanity metrics.
#4 Don’t neglect the power of Facebook events
Webinar best practices also include Facebook events. We live at such a giddy speed that it’s getting harder to remember everything that’s happening. Reminders are lifesavers for many, and that’s just one argument to setup an event on Facebook - to make sure that no one forgets about your webinar. It also gives your live video a heart and soul for the few days before you go live. You can write an outstanding copy (with the right keywords) to describe the topic of your webinar and keep your future audience engaged with posts that are published from time to time.
Creating an event can also help with buzz marketing and generating some organic traffic. Thanks to the fact that events enable users to mark their attendance by hitting the “participate” button, this activity will pop-up in their friends’ feeds. Plus, events have undeniably the most powerful feature - they can be enhanced with paid promotion, which opens up a whole new spectrum of reaching potential clients.
#5 Make sure your followers stay tuned in with InstaStories
If you can think about making your webinar promotion a complex action plan, then Instagram could become a tremendous complementary space. It provides you with a bunch of extra options to boost traffic with both organic and paid publications. If you have a business account on Facebook, you can automatically schedule paid campaigns via Instagram using an Instagram scheduler and make the most of them.
Although organic traffic alone isn’t enough, it can leverage your actions and lead conversion. By creating InstaStories, you can make sure that your followers stay tuned in for your webinar. What’s more, you can schedule a reminder for the exact time and date - and we’ve already said how important doing that is. Here you can read how to make the most of the stories option provided by Instagram, which can help you with planning promotion for webinars (or any other types of content).
#6 Collaboration is your cheapest (yet efficient) weapon
Cooperating with other people might be the most cost-effective solution of them all. Although sometimes you have to pay your partner for taking part in a webinar, this can often can be made on barter terms - and as we all know, barter doesn’t mean for free. The aim of co-hosting a webinar is that both of you can reach one another’s audience and gain new followers who are very likely to make a purchase or use your service.
You can collaborate with reps from your business industry to provide your audience with useful knowledge, show that you are an expert in your field, and thus gain their trust. Often when people see a name that is widely known and respected, that influences and leverages the positive perception of your brand. Depending on what your company does, you can consider starting a partnership with influencers too. If you’re a salesperson, cooperating with influencers can make it easier to establish a feeling of trust through familiarity.
Here you can read an article (which is a complete guide) about how to combine influencer marketing with other promotion strategies. If you’re already working with influencers, there’s nothing simpler than using that superpower and making a cross webinar. You could talk about upcoming trends or beauty hacks, for example, and show off your products during a live video. The options are almost endless, so don’t neglect them in your marketing strategy.
#7 All eyes on the hashtag
Webinar best practices could not do without hashtags. This is somewhat connected to keyword research and using the right phrases with the name of your brand in them. To help build a discussion around your company’s products or services and to keep your clients in the loop, you should consider creating a specific hashtag. This is especially helpful when using Twitter for marketing purposes because the conversations and comments posted by its users are mostly gathered around one particular topic.
If you’re making a special event, introducing a new line of products, or planning a webinar, then make a hashtag to boost your buzz marketing and meet the needs of your followers. By doing so you can funnel the conversations rising around your brand - after all, an engaged audience is simply better.
#8 Don’t neglect the power of LinkedIn
Last but not least, if you want your webinar to reach people from the business industry, consider promoting it via LinkedIn. Although it might be a bit more expensive than other social media platforms, that’s because the probability of reaching the right audience who are more likely to spend money on your products is higher too. Business people are used to investing in things they find useful, so if that’s what you need then say hello to the LinkedIn community!
Depending on your budget, you can start by growing traffic organically and then consider enhancing it with paid promotion. Write a post, inform about the webinar agenda, and remember to add a CTA. You can ask your business partners and friends to share your post to create a bit of a buzz. Organic traffic doesn’t cost you anything and might help you to attract at least a few more people. It probably won’t reach a wide audience, but who knows - maybe these three participants are just the ones you’re looking for?
A video comes to an end, but webinar promotion doesn’t
What do you regard about our webinar best practices? We’ve answered the most common questions and talked about practices to take into account when planning webinar promotion. There’s something else that can’t be forgotten if you want to make a good impression, which is remembering to send a message after the webinar.
Write a thank-you email to show appreciation to your audience for their participation. Consider providing them with something extra, like highlights from the presentation. If you would like to demonstrate your expert knowledge, you could consider making an on-demand section where you gather your previous videos. LiveWebinar enables you to record them in HD quality for your audience’s comfort. Also, with the option of evergreen webinars, saving a live video has never been easier.
10 Best tips to promote a webinar
Long story short, these are the aspects to consider when creating a webinar marketing strategy:
- Identify your audience and reach them in the right places.
- Make a webinar about a topic that would be useful for your audience.
- Perform keyword research to know what people would like to learn and hear about.
- Join groups and spaces on social media.
- Create events on Facebook and enhance them with paid promotion.
- Use Instagram to promote your webinar.
- Think of making a cross webinar with business people or influencers.
- Create specific hashtags to funnel the discussion around your webinar and brand.
- Consider webinar promotion on LinkedIn (even if you don’t want to invest money on paid advertising).
- Send something special after the webinar.
If you are still wondering about how to drive traffic to your website with webinars, or how to use webinar best practices, we’ve already written about it. In this article, you can read about making webinars that convert. And if you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to contact us!