How to promote a webinar? 5 essential tips

The central role of the webinar

During the long complicated period of the pandemic and lockdowns, the popularity of webinars really soared. At a time when in-person meetings were forbidden (or at any rate inadvisable), webinars were an invaluable tool for continuing distance learning, for staying up to date, for staying in touch with employees and contractors, but also for interfacing with actual and potential customers. Having passed the moment of emergency, webinars are still here, and have become part of our routine, and today exist even alongside in-person events. It’s one of the clearest signs that the future of business and communication will increasingly be a scenario of fruitful integration between the physical and digital aspects.

Webinars can be live, with the possibility for the audience to interact in real time through chat functionality. They can be pre-recorded, but distributed at specific times to allow for interaction and immediate responses (again via chat). Or, they can require pre-registration and be enjoyed by users, after logging in, whenever they choose to watch them.

Beyond the different possible forms, promotion is a key factor for the success of any webinar. This is an intuitive aspect: if the webinar is attended by an insufficient number of people, the investment of time and money put into its implementation are in vain, or at least less than ideal. Also, please note: when we talk about webinar promotion (recorded or live) this includes not only the pre-publication stages, but also the post-publication stages.

This brings us to the heart of this post: how to promote a webinar? To answer this question, we’ll show you how through 5 essential tips. 

How to promote a webinar – 5 best practices

Producing and distributing webinars offers companies enormous advantages that are reflected both internally (in the case of content that is designed for employees and contractors) and externally (in the case of content designed for actual or potential customers). Dissemination of know-how, network enlargement, strengthening of the image and reputation, proximity to the target audience, lead generation, loyalty, advocacy. All of these benefits constitute a virtuous circle, which starts from one crucial point: the ability to offer added value to the viewer.

Now, as promised, let’s look at the best ways to promote a webinar. We’ve identified the 5 most important tips that you need to know.

Email promotion

Let’s start with traditional email, a channel that is still decisive and extremely effective, perhaps even more so than people think. Let’s see what the data has to say:

• Today, one out of every two media planning experts use email marketing. This is a very high and growing percentage (hubspot.com).
• 64% of smaller companies are using email marketing to reach their customers (campaignmonitor.com).
• 37% of brands are increasing their email marketing budget; in contrast, only 1.3% are cutting it (litmus.com).

Of course, it’s not enough to indiscriminately email all of your contacts.
The first key word to keep in mind is “segmentation.” Segmentation is about dividing your target audience into subsets with similar characteristics. The criteria for this breakdown can be quite diverse: biographical, psycho-social, geographical, based on previous interactions between the recipient and the companies…and much more. It all depends on the type of webinar and its goals. Once these clusters have been identified, the next step is to tailor the content of the email, making it very specific, thus more effective for the identified micro-target.
The ultimate frontier? True personalization; something we will return to in the fourth item on our list.

Before we move on, however, here are a couple of quick suggestions:

• Pay maximum attention to the subject line of the email. It must be concise, effective, and able to pique the curiosity of the recipient. The open rate heavily depends on this aspect.
• In addition to the text part of the email, visuals are extremely important. The most effective medium in this regard is undoubtedly video, which must be short and punchy, well constructed, and designed in an omnichannel mode.

The indispensable social media 

Answering the question of how to promote a webinar must include social media channels. Of course, there is a huge difference between a promotion designed for LinkedIn, versus one designed for TikTok (just to give two diverse examples).

So, where to start? Start with the type of webinar and its target audience. It’s a matter of figuring out where these potentially interested people are most likely to be found. Are they on LinkedIn? On Twitter? On Facebook? On Instagram? On TikTok?
There is no “right” answer, of course. We recommend taking advantage of as many social media outlets as possible, allocating the right resources to each one (according to a preliminary analysis of the target audience) and adapting your communications to the different technical rules and best practices of each channel.

Even on social networks, the medium that provides the most effective communication, the widest reach, and the best engagement is video.

Lean on influencers

Promotion on social networks is essential, and it concerns the phases before the webinar, with the objective of bringing in the largest number of participants, and the period following it, where the goal is to promote the recording of the event (if it is a live event, or in any case distributed on a one-off basis at a given time). It’s not just a matter of aiming for large numbers, for the “quantity” of participants, but also and especially for their “quality.” In this sense, relying on influencers is one of the best strategies if you want to simultaneously aim for quantity and quality. 

Don’t forget these important data points:

• On average, influencer marketing reported an ROI of $6.50 for every dollar spent (adweek.com). 
• About 70% of millennials are in some way directed in their choices by influencers (startupsmagazine.com).

Again, it all depends on the target audience. You need to know how to choose the right personality, who has characteristics and a following that are consistent with the themes and targets of your webinar. In some cases, it is best to involve influencers who fit somewhere between the traditional “expert” and the influencer. And be careful not to overly focus on the number of followers! They aren’t mega- or macro-influencers, but micro- or nano-influencers. These personalities have a smaller, but almost always more loyal following. In short, they are often perceived as closer and more credible.

The power of video: from automation to personalization  

We mentioned this earlier when talking about email promotion and when talking about social media; we also implied it when talking about influencers: there is no promotional tool that is more effective than video. It’s a matter of capturing attention, communicative effectiveness, memorability, and engagement. The numbers and supporting statistics are extremely telling. Take a look at this post from our blog to see the most important points.

There is a downside, however. Quality video production requires an investment of time, money, and personnel (often external to the company). This opens up a delicate question of balancing costs and benefits. Let’s say it up front: this issue can be solved through automation.
What do we mean—and how? With Babelee‘s Video Automation platform, you can produce high quality videos quickly, while taking advantage of pre-set templates that can be widely customized.
Not only that, Babelee’s Video platform is designed to be data driven. In other words: starting from a data set, you can produce a potentially infinite number of videos that are always automatically tailored to the characteristics of the recipients. This is the personalization breakthrough that we alluded to earlier in the first point of this list.

Here is a specific example that can serve as inspiration. Through the Babelee platform, you can include statistics and information in your promotional video that will then be presented and elaborated upon during the event.

Don’t miss these other posts on our blog for more information:

• Explore this post to learn more about everything related to video data visualization.
• In this post, you will learn how Video Automation works.
• Finally, this post shares everything you need to know about Video Personalization.

The next steps – readjust and repurpose   

With this final point on how to promote a webinar, we will focus entirely on the steps after the event has taken place. This is when you will end up with valuable video material, which can and should be leveraged. How? There are many different ways, but they are all related to repurposing.
You can extract important clips from the original video and repurpose them on social media for example, and perhaps accompanied by text captioning and/or subtitles.
You can create a Q&A by combining participant questions with the speakers’ answers.
Or, again, you can use different clips to make snackable content. (These are just a few examples).

The ultimate goal? To offer a small taste of what the webinar was about, highlighting its usefulness, its interest to your target audience. And it’s precisely these excerpts that can be turned into the first effective tools for promoting your next webinar!

Babelee

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