How to attract an audience to your webinar

The big day comes, but you fell short of registration targets, only a handful of people bothered to attend, and you had zero engagement during the webinar.

Starting out with webinars, getting an audience for your webinar should be easy, right?

Your webinar topic is relevant, the presenter is a known thought leader with a good audience, and your company is a popular brand.

You set up your event, schedule a few emails, a couple of social posts. Build it and they will come.

Lesson Learned: promoting webinars does take some planning and effort.

Now your webinar program is under pressure to deliver results, fast.

As you’ve seen, without a promotional plan, you are likely to waste a lot of time, effort, and budget on promotion that nobody sees.

Consider these webinar stats;

• Email is the best strategy to promote any webinar, driving 57% of registrations
• 54.7% of webinar registrations happen <7 days before the event
• Tuesday is the day of the week with the most registrations, followed by Thursday (20.3%) and Monday (19%). These are the best days to send out invitations to your webinar.

Here are 5 webinar promotion tips for webinar promotion success.

Attracting Your Audience

People are busy, reduce friction by making the sign-up process as easy as possible. Don’t ask for too much information, this is a sure-fire way of bombing conversion rates on your registration page. Most of the additional information that is asked at registration, such as company headcount, country, or industry, can be easily added after registration with the help of data enrichment tools such as Apollo.io or Cognism.

Work backwards from the start date

…and plan a schedule from each component, adding in an extra day or two for any delays.

In an ideal world, you will start planning around 7 weeks before your event & begin promotion around 5/6 weeks before. But 4 weeks is sufficient for most cases, as 59% of registrants come in the 7 days before a webinar. As you consider these tactics, make sure you think about how much time it will take for copy creation, design, and any development needs. There’s no point saying you’ll send out your first email in three days if you aren’t able to get the email copy written and approved in time.

Let’s look at some key marketing assets and guidance for you to consider when promoting your event.

Key marketing assets for webinar promotion

Conversion path

Let people know about the webinar, add a call-to-action to your homepage, on blogs, on the thank-you pages of other content offers, in emails, social media and anywhere else potential attendees are. The CTA should send people to a user-friendly & engaging landing page, make the process as frictionless as possible.

Pro-tip: Tie the CTA copy into the perceived value instead of the action (instead of using “Register now”, write “Improve my cold emails”)

Website pop-up window

A regular CTA on your website can attract attention, but a pop-up CTA can really capture interest, it feels fresh while creating a sense of urgency. You can use tools like Intercom or Userled for this.

Promotional video

A short promotional video can be shared via your social media accounts and through email. Giving teaser information about what visitors will learn in the webinar. Promotional videos can also be a great way of demonstrating the expertise of your speaker, giving people a good reason to come watch your webinar.

Promotional emails

Email is far and away the most effective promotional channel for webinars, accounting for 57% of registrations. Use this opportunity wisely. Here’s an effective 3-step email guide.

• Email 1 – Simple heads up, making them aware of the event and to save the date.
• Email 2 – A week before. Include a video promo that whets their appetite on the gems they are going to miss if they don’t attend.
• Email 3 (and beyond) – Most people will wait to sign up until it’s closer to the webinar date, make sure you are promoting your webinar via email right up until the day of the event. Give them FOMO, it can’t hurt!

Top tip: Segmenting your emails based on whether someone has registered. If someone has already registered for the webinar, it’s great to send them a couple of reminder emails when the date draws near. Once they’ve registered, your registrants should not be receiving further promotional emails. Most webinar platforms will have CRM integrations or with marketing tools to help with this. If I’m already signed up for a webinar, and they continue to market to me, it shows no attention to detail and makes me question whether to turn up at all. Don’t risk undoing all the hard work you’ve put in.

Bonus Tip: After the event, you are going to want to attempt to reconvert anyone that hasn’t watched live. Using the attendee data you have from your webinar tool, you can personalize the after event outreach.

Contrast gives you the ability to personalize & segment after event emails so that you can adapt your messaging based on whether someone has attended live or not yet seen your event.

All this being said, this is only an overall guide.

Looking for something a little more specific? Let's chat.

P.S. Now you know how to attract an audience, find out how to make your webinars interactive.