How To Promote A B2B Webinar

Planning a B2B webinar is no small feat. Developing the strategy, curating the content, securing reputable speakers, setting up the technical production...there’s plenty to keep you busy. 

Of course, all of the above is pointless if no one turns up to your online event. The name of the game is promotion, and the goal is to acquire as many high quality leads as possible.

There are so many ways you can do this, but whatever you do, your webinar strategy should be at the forefront of your decision making. 

Consider who are you targeting, and why? What kind of budget do you need to hit your targets? What creative message is going to grab the attention of your target audience? There’s plenty to think about before you’re ready to launch your webinar campaign.

In this post, we’ll discuss the typical promotional activities that you should be doing in order to attract the right type of leads to register for your webinar.

To learn more about how to create high-performing webinars, get your free copy of our guide >>> 10 Steps To Building The Ultimate B2B Webinar.

Start With An Optimised Landing Page

Landing pages have a pivotal role in webinar performance and often don’t get enough focus. Your webinar landing page is the shop window for your online event. It sells the reason to attend.

As a prerequisite for a basic landing page, you’ll need the following information:

• The headline topic - make it enticing! 
• A detailed description of the agenda including what areas will be covered in the session
• A registration form that collects only the critical contact details you need - this may include any pre qualification criteria that will help you iron out unsuitable registrants
• The date and time of your webinar  (Here’s a tip - according to research on thousands of webinars, attendance is highest on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and particularly Thursdays, and at 11am or 2pm)
• Details on the speaker, their job title / role and why they have credibility to be on the panel

Don’t Go Overboard With Data Collection

Think carefully about the details you want to collect from your landing page visitors because people don’t like giving away lots of information unnecessarily.

Strip back your fields to minimise barriers to conversion as much as you can, but be sure to collect any useful information that can help you segment and qualify your leads as necessary. This could be details like job title, company industry, or company size.

Remember to Say Thank You

Create a thank you page that visitors land on once they register through your form. There are ways to operate without a thank you page, but having one is particularly beneficial for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, the easiest way to set up conversion tracking on your ad platforms is to use a thank you page URL. Conversion tracking will be necessary for you to stay on top of your performance reporting and optimise your promotional activities. 

Secondly, having a thank you page will give you the opportunity to further engage your registrants right away. Ask them what they would like to learn in your webinar with a quick survey, or direct them to learn a bit more about your company to help build brand authority before the webinar

Release A Teaser Video

83% of B2B marketers believe that video content is more important than ever before - we concur! With mobile so prolific in daily use, video is a fast and effective way to distil the core messages of your webinar agenda and present it to a highly engaged audience.

Consider putting together a 1 - 2 minute teaser video introducing what you will be talking about in your webinar, and who the key speakers will be.

Though this requires some upfront work to put together, it’s a great way to show off some of the content you will be presenting and the production value of your webinar, and build some hype around any high profile speakers.

You can simply upload the video to a video hosting platform such as YouTube or Vimeo, and promote it using a link. Include it on your landing page by embedding the video into the page, too.

Add A Pop-Up On Your Website

Some declared popups to be dead a couple of years ago. But they’re not! Used effectively, they can be a highly valuable source of leads for your webinar, converting up to 9% for some websites. 

This could come in the form of a hello bar at the top of the screen, or an exit intent pop-up that appears when someone is about to leave the page. It’s up to you. Just be careful not to be too aggressive with how often and quickly it appears, you still want your visitors to have a good experience on your website.

Consider which pages are appropriate to put the pop-up on. Your webinar target audience may more likely be looking at certain pages than others.

A benefit of pop-ups is that you can capture leads quickly if you’ve got an in-built form, but on the other hand, you’ll have less opportunity to share more detailed information the way you can on a landing page.

That being the case, it is good practice to send a confirmation email that details some of the webinar information, so people have a better idea of what they signed up for.

Maximise Thank You Pages From Other Campaigns

Add a call-to-action to the webinar on landing pages that you are using for other marketing campaigns.

Again, thank you pages can be used to direct visitors to more useful information. It doesn’t always have to be a dead end. So why not direct them to your webinar landing page?

As always, keep in mind your target audience. Not all of your campaigns are necessarily targeting the right people you want to attract to your webinar, but some may be!

Include A Call-To-Action On Blog Pages

A quick and easy lead generation tactic for your webinar is to put a CTA on blog pages that have contextual relevance with the webinar you’re running. This could simply be a call-out or banner at the bottom of the page.

Identify which of your blog posts would be of interest to your webinar’s target audience, and select those to put your CTA on. That way you will more likely be capturing the right people.

Make it stand out using an engaging design or banner format so that it doesn’t get lost amongst your blog copy.

Make Email Signatures Work Harder

You could also put a banner linking to your webinar landing page in your email signature, which can be seen by anyone you send emails to.

This is a really quick and easy way to gain more reach, but you’ll likely be promoting to a mixed bag audience that may not be particularly targeted (depending on who you normally send out emails to).

That being the case, this method may only be suitable for certain circumstances. For example, your account team may want clients to be aware of a specific webinar that you’re running which may help with retention. Or alternatively, you may have a webinar subject aligned to the early stages of the buyer journey, where you can usually afford to widen your net.

Of course, you can be selective about whose email signature you put your banners in. You’ve probably got better chances putting it on a salesperson’s signature than on someone’s from HR...

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Post On Owned Social Media Channels

Promote your webinar on your company’s social media channels. 

If you already have a healthy number of company followers, this is a no-brainer. Posting on social media is free, and your company’s following are already interested in your brand. If you’ve got particularly dedicated followers, they may just share your post and promote your webinar for you.

Where appropriate, make sure you also use your own staff to share posts to their networks. Interacting with any company posts will also help to increase the viral effectiveness.

If you’re using LinkedIn, it’s a great place to find relevant member groups to which you can share your link if you want to reach more people outside your follower pool.

Use Targeted Paid Social Ads

Granted, a down-side to advertising on social media platforms is that it costs money. But ad platforms, like LinkedIn, allow you to be very specific with your targeting criteria and expand your reach out to the perfect audience. The more targeted, the better, when you’re using a precious marketing budget.

These targeting capabilities are particularly useful and worthwhile when your webinar is catered to an audience that has already expressed an interest with your product or service. This audience is therefore more likely to buy from you, which will give you a better ROI on your ad spend.

Leverage Your Partners’ Networks

If you’ve got any, ask your partners and evangelists to help you promote your webinar to their own network. 

Think about whose network fits your target profile. You’ll have much better chances convincing your partners to help you if they can share it with a network they know will actually be interested to attend.

Simply send them an email or a message on social media to get them involved. You could even write up a message for them to send around to make it easier for them. 

If you’re lucky, some might even be willing to be more engaged and help you throughout the duration of your webinar campaign.

Send Out Dedicated Email Sequences

With an automated email sequence to a targeted list, you can be very purposeful with the timings and cadence of your emails. In fact, research has shown that sending your emails out on a Tuesday will result in a higher sign-up rate to your webinars.

You should aim to send your first email 2 or 3 weeks in advance of the webinar and send a few reminders after that. 

Take advantage of automation to segment your email lists and personalise the emails. For example, adjust email copy based on the contact’s company industry and explain how someone from their industry can benefit from attending your webinar. 

Or, if someone opened your first email but didn’t sign up, you can send them an email asking them why they weren’t interested.

In your emails, be sure to mention that you will send a recording after the webinar. Not everyone would be available to attend your webinar live, and some simply would prefer to watch it at their own time.

Send Out Follow Up Emails

Did you know only around 40% of webinar registrants actually attend?

For this reason, it’s so important to follow up with all your registrants, whether they have attended or not. Send them a recording of your webinar to continue getting views and engaging your non-attendees.

And don’t stop there - keep nurturing your leads with a sequence of automated emails that help educate them on your brand and your offering with more content; blog posts, case studies, more webinars…

Nurturing your webinar leads will help you build authority and develop trust with your leads, many of which may have had limited exposure to your brand thus far. Ultimately, this will help you close more deals and get a higher ROI on your webinar promotional activities.

Summary

There are countless ways you could go about promoting your B2B webinar, but you’ve got to carefully evaluate what methods are right for you before directing valuable resource and marketing budget toward it.

The most important consideration is how you can target the right audience for your webinar. If it’s a broader audience you’re looking to attract, you can be a bit more relaxed about how laser focused your promotional efforts are. 

But if you’re trying to attract people further down the buyer journey or if your webinar is on a niche topic that would be of interest to a smaller group, you’re better off using methods that allow you to target very accurately.

Whatever you choose, be sure to always measure performance across all your promotional channels, and also the performance of your webinar, to gain more marketing intelligence and improve promotional efforts for your next webinar.