Are you thinking about hosting a social media webinar but don’t know where to begin? Perhaps you’ve hosted a webinar in the past but didn’t quite reach your goals.
Either way, I know webinars are an extremely important marketing strategy for businesses across all industries. These events present the perfect opportunity to engage with your audience, turn first-time visitors into subscribers, and increase sales.
For context, we found that 20-40% of webinar attendees become qualified leads!
If you want to ensure your next webinar succeeds by attracting prospects and existing customers, keep reading because I will share 6 practical tips that will help you on your journey. I highly recommend taking these tips and finding ways to merge them with your own ideas and strategies so you can maximize the value of your next webinar.
Ready? Let’s begin!
Choose a Topic that Matters to Your Audience
The most important thing you can do to ensure your webinar is a hit is choose topics that matter to your target audience. If people don’t resonate with the topic, every other aspect of your video event will fall flat.
Take a look at your customer personas so you can identify the goals, pain points, and needs of people who visit your website and engage with your brand. Use this information to come up with ideas that people will find relevant and interesting.
If you’re just starting and don’t have much information about your customers, consider putting a survey on your website and sending questionnaires to your email subscribers. Ask targeted questions like, “Which of the following topics do you find most interesting?” followed by a few ideas for your webinar.
Gather data and use their responses to plan topics that are relevant to your future customers, and you’re already off to a great start.
Reach Out to Email Subscribers
Once you’ve decided on a topic, it’s time to reach out to existing email subscribers. The people who’ve gone through the trouble to join your email list are the ones who are most likely to attend your event.
I like to give our subscribers a chance to sign up before everyone else by starting a drip campaign a week before the official launch. I’ve found that this exclusivity leads to more signups because people want to know more about this webinar that’s not publicly promoted yet.
You can encourage people to take action by sending invitations to the correct customer segments. For instance, if a pet store were doing a webinar on cat care, they would send invitations to people who say they’re interested in cats or have purchased cat products in the past.
Personalizing emails this way is a great way to get more signups, as 80% of people say they’re more likely to engage with a brand if the content is relevant to their interests.
Toward the end of your campaign, you may want to consider using fear of missing out (FOMO) strategies to spark signups. A few days before your webinar, you could send an email that reads “Last Chance to Save Your Seat!” This type of marketing is extremely effective, with 56% of online shoppers claiming they’ve experienced FOMO.
Connect with Users on Social Media
Of course, connecting with users on social media is a vital way to get more eyes on your webinar. Believe it or not, over 4.75 billion people use social media, and that number is going up every year.
There are many ways to build hype around your webinar and increase attendance. One method we’ve found to work well is hosting a contest one month before the presentation. We invite users to enter for a chance to win by visiting our dedicated webinar landing page (more on that soon!).
I’m also a big fan of partnering with affiliates and influencers to promote events. On average, 65% of marketers say they’ve used affiliate marketing to connect with existing customers and people who were otherwise already familiar with their brand.
Influencers and affiliates are a great way to show users that your brand is reputable and trusted by well-known figures in the community. This metaphorical seal of approval could be just the thing to turn casual visitors into webinar attendees.
Create a Dedicated Landing Page
Next, let’s explain why you should create a dedicated webinar landing page for your event. If you’re promoting the event on social media and through email, that’s great! But how do you expect website visitors to know about your upcoming webinar?
A landing page allows you to quickly and easily share event details with users, which could inspire them to take action.
Here are a few things I suggest including on your webinar landing page:
– The name, date, and time of your event
– A link to social media channels where users can attend
– Access to a signup form for the webinar
– A list of expected topics and special guests
– What visitors will gain from attending the event (knowledge, downloadable content, etc)
Ask Attendees for Feedback
It’s very important to ask attendees for feedback at the end of the presentation. You can do this by sending a survey through email or including a link for users to follow once you’ve ended the stream.
Satisfaction surveys are crucial because they help you determine what people like and where you can do better next time. Without reading actionable feedback, it’s hard to improve your webinars and video marketing strategy as a whole.
I like to include a mix of open-ended and closed questions so attendees can openly share their thoughts while providing us with targeted answers.
For instance, a close-ended question could be, “How would you rate our webinar on a scale of 1-10?” The closed nature of this question means we can gather concrete data and figure out what people thought of the presentation.
As for open-ended questions, we like to ask, “How can we improve our next webinar?” We tend to find plenty of great suggestions in this feedback because users can type in their responses and give us actionable tips for improving over time.
Upload a Replay of Your Presentation
Finally, if you want to improve the long-term value of your webinars, don’t forget to upload replays so people who couldn’t make the event can watch later.
I suggest uploading them to the 2nd largest search engine in the world – YouTube. Over 1.9 billion people use this social media giant regularly, so it’s easy to see why this is a great place to store your videos.
There’s another benefit to this strategy: you can embed the videos from YouTube to your website. This step will ensure the video doesn’t drastically slow down your site and can also improve traffic. We found that adding videos to our site, specifically blog posts, led to 157% more organic search traffic.
People will want to see your event but may forget to sign up or be unavailable when you go live. When possible, uploading a replay of the presentation can help boost traffic and brand awareness, which can contribute to the success of your next webinar.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, preparing your webinar strategy for success requires patience, foresight, and careful planning. You must plan to reach users through multiple marketing channels before and after the event. Everything you do, from gathering feedback when coming up with a topic to uploading the video replay will directly impact the success of current and future webinars.
