How To Use Webinar Marketing for Business Growth

Webinars are an asset to any marketing plan for businesses hoping to create a stronger online presence, especially with social media and other online outlets. Marketing teams run webinars to build brand awareness, boost lead generation, and convert potential customers into buyers. If you think of your webinars as a campaign tool, you’ll begin to see how webinar marketing contributes to business growth. In fact, 45% of marketers say webinars drive impressive results and are their leading marketing tool.

To develop a webinar marketing strategy that meets your needs and helps you achieve your goals, you have to learn what resonates with your audience, incorporate various tactics into your webinar promotion, and measure the results. Be sure to consider and implement:

• Your webinar goals (e.g., new leads, higher ROI, more conversions, greater brand awareness)
• Your webinar format (e.g., product demo, Q&A, discussion panel)
• Your target audience
• Your audience’s intent

You can fine-tune and modify your webinar marketing efforts as you go so you achieve the highest ROI from your online events. Leverage your webinar analytics tools to measure important metrics like audience engagement, how many attendees you have versus registrants, and more. Read on to discover how your webinar marketing strategy can push business growth, as well as new ways to foster stronger brand awareness and thought leadership online.

What Is Webinar Marketing?

Webinar marketing is a method of connecting with your audience while promoting a product, service, or your brand. Thanks to the virtual nature of webinars, you’re able to reach a global audience, which eliminates the limitations of hosting live webinars in a physical location.

With customers shopping online and thoroughly researching brands, products, and services before committing to a purchase, creating a webinar to promote your brand is the modern-day version of mailing a catalog to entice buyers. To promote your brand properly and impart valuable information to your target segment, you need to make sure your webinars are engaging and your marketing efforts enticing. Promoting webinars is thus essential to build and grow your business, so you need to invest adequate time and resources to construct top-notch campaigns.

Importance of Marketing Your Webinars

Marketing your webinars entails more than pushing your brand online. You need to establish thought leadership and cultivate an authentic connection with your audience. Both these elements will give your webinar marketing a leg-up so you draw in a larger virtual crowd.

Establish Thought Leadership

When you create educational, inspirational, and insightful webinars, you establish yourself as an expert in your industry and your brand as an attractive solution. This is important for differentiating your offerings from those of your competitors. Thought leadership also builds trust and loyalty among your consumers, who’ll hold your opinions and products in high regard and be more likely to trust your brand over your competitors.

Cultivate an Authentic Audience Connection

Webinar engagement features enable you to develop a genuine connection with your audience. Whether live, automated, or on-demand, interactive elements like featured actions, polls and surveys, and live chat can make your webinars engaging and memorable .

When your target demographic knows you understand their pain points and how you can solve them, they feel heard and develop closer ties to your brand. Webinar marketing gives you the opportunity to connect with your attendees and form relationships that you can nurture over the long term, which benefits your brand and your company image.

Start by Defining Your Goals and Audience

To minimize the amount of money and energy needed to market your webinars, establish your goals for the event as well as the audience you want to attract. That information will guide your webinar efforts to success and avoid costly mistakes and do-overs.

Your Webinar Goals

Your goals will influence which webinar formats to adopt. Is your objective to build brand awareness, gain sales, or generate high-quality leads? Depending on the answer, you may find a product demo, Q&A session, panelist discussion, educational or how-to webinar, or some other format is best for achieving the goal.

Your Audience

What demographic are you targeting, and what are their pain points and interests? What do they search online, and who do they currently buy from? Knowing these characteristics helps you hone in on your audience’s intent so you can construct quality webinar presentations that best engage them.

Select Your Marketing Channels and Platforms

Think about how you’ll promote and host your webinar. Which outlets, including channels and platforms, will maximize your reach and help drive optimal results?You can use as many as you’d like but, for a more targeted approach, focus on the channels and platforms where your audience is most active and feels the most comfortable.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is great for nurturing leads who’ve already shown an interest in your brand or have attended past webinars. You can also create a drip campaign to build excitement around your events and  boost attendance rates.

Use email marketing as well to close deals at the conclusion of your online events (more on this later).

Social Media

Leverage the social media channels your audience uses to publish links, promos, and sneak peeks about your webinars and other brand activities. You can also engage with your audience (and further pique their interest) by including polls and surveys in your social media posts.

Blog Posts

Advertise your webinars, including automated and on-demand sessions, on your website and in guest posts on partner sites. Partners promote your content to their audiences, which broadens your reach and helps you acquire new leads.

Partnerships

As mentioned above, collaborations can help grow your brand and your audience. Both parties benefit since you each gain access to an established consumer base related to your niche. Choose partners relevant to your brand (but who aren’t direct competitors) so the collaboration makes sense and draws in potential customers naturally.

Landing Pages

A landing page is an excellent way to advertise a webinar and make registration straightforward without being too salesy. Content should be easy to read, with topics, speakers, and incentives introduced up front. Feature a clear call to action as well to encourage registration.

Create an Irresistible Offer and CTA

Always include something of interest for your webinar attendees. They want to know there’s something in it for them if they devote their time to watch your event — so make it worth their while.

Build Relatable Offers and CTAs

Make sure any featured actions, offers, and CTAs clearly relate to the webinar content. This avoids coming off as salesy or pushy and makes these elements immediately useful to your audience members.

Remember Your Audience Pain Points

What are your audience’s struggles? What’s stopping them from making a purchase? What do your competitors lack that they hope to find in your brand? Use these pain points to craft unique CTAs that encourage conversions. Your audience’s needs should strengthen your brand, not limit it.

Mention Offers and CTAs Often

Without being too pushy, mention CTAs and offers regularly in your webinars. Take advantage of interactive features to insert links, CTAs, and other featured actions throughout your virtual event to maintain your audience’s attention. Since many purchases and commitments are emotionally driven, if you have tempting and time-sensitive offers and CTAs scattered throughout your webinar, you’ll achieve more impressive results.

Make Your Webinar Outstanding

An outstanding webinar with valuable content continues your marketing efforts by moving leads further along their buyer’s journey. Keep your audience riveted and ready to commit to a purchase or some other conversion by leveraging interactive features and focusing on audience interests and pain points in your CTAs.

Use Interactive Elements

Demio simplifies the creation of interactive webinars that capture attendees from start to finish and move them through your sales pipeline. Include engagement features like surveys and polls to encourage audience participation and build connections to nurture after the event. You can even chat with attendees in real time, even if you host automated and on-demand webinars.

Learn What Your Audience Wants

Your audience tells you how effective your webinars are (and, tangentially, your marketing) by how they respond to your incentives, CTAs, featured actions, and other elements. Use webinar analytics tools to track what triggers action in your attendees and double-down on those offerings before, during, and after the event.

A Q&A session complete with audience spotlighting excels at uncovering this information and other valuable insights to apply to your future events and advertising activities, so consider incorporating these at the end of each webinar.

Optimize the Registration Process and Webinar Landing Page

Your webinar registration and landing pages describe what your audience will learn and the key takeaways for your sessions. To that end, there are a few best practices to follow to optimize these pages.

Make It Simple

The registration form should be a single page that’s easy to fill out. You can collect more information from your registrants through reminder and follow-up emails. At the start, focus on convincing prospects to commit to attending. Demio makes it easy for registrants to sign up and then be redirected to a custom webinar page of your design.

Keep It to the Point

Clearly state your webinar’s title, date and time, speakers, and key points on the landing page. Your audience shouldn’t have to guess what your webinar is about, otherwise, they may think it’s not worth their time. Don’t lose a sale by being coy. Prove you’re worth your audience’s time by being up front and to the point.

Make Your Webinar Accessible

You should frequently push your landing and registration pages on your website, social media pages, and in email marketing campaigns targeting your intended demographic. You can make your webinar readily accessible with Demio’s integration tools so your audience can find your brand easily.

Follow up With Prospects

If you think all you have to do is count registrations and you’re solid as far as webinar attendance, guess again. Only about 44% of your registrants will show up to your webinar, and of those who attend, a portion will drop off and not convert. To maintain a high conversion rate, you need to nurture prospects both before and after the event with well-crafted follow-up communications.

Pre-webinar Connection

Any time before the webinar is a great opportunity to reach out to registrants and remind them of the event, as well as reengage anyone who’s moved on to other interests. A strong CTA helps keep prospects hooked, so be sure to include one in every message. Demio features customized email marketing tools you can employ to ensure prospects are committed to attend.

Post-webinar Connection

Engage your audience after your webinar concludes to close the sale and secure conversions. Send an email thanking your audience for attending and include a survey for them to fill out to help you improve your future webinars.

Repurpose Your Webinar Content

A successful webinar isn’t a one-and-done marketing tool; you can benefit from the same virtual event repeatedly. Repurposing your webinars expands your reach globally, which helps you gain more followers and loyal consumers.

Create Automated Webinars

A webinar with evergreen content can be edited for automation. This enables you to replay the webinar over and over for audiences old and new, extending the shelf life (and ROI) of your virtual events.

Insert snippets ofou can interact with audiences through live chat, Q&A moderation, and more. Demio provides these and other impressive tools to foster enriching conversations and connections during on-demand webinars. Timed featured actions, for instance, prevent sessions from going stale, and you can even plan when you interact with audiences in real time.

Create On-Demand Webinars

A major appeal of on-demand webinars is registrants can sign up for and view a session almost instantly. That convenience drives more sales from prospects who are simply curious or on the fence about committing to your brand.

Insert snippets of your automated content into your email drip campaigns to excite audiences about your upcoming webinars. You can also display short videos on your website, landing page, social media platforms, and registration pages to keep audiences engaged and curious.

Analyze Results and Improve

Your webinars should improve so they better engage your audiences each time they launch. Luckily, you can use your webinar platform’s analytics tools to pinpoint where attendees are most engaged (and which featured actions they respond to most) so you know how to market them properly. Demio’s analytics tools, for example, allow you to track audience interest in your webinars so you know exactly which features and topics to market most.

Registration Versus Attendance

How do your registration numbers compare to your attendance rate? If there’s a significant disparity in the ratio, focus on strengthening your pre-webinar email campaigns or refining your landing or registration pages.

Click-Through Rates

You’re looking for the click-through rates for both your pre-webinar and post-webinar communication efforts. Which emails, links, and other incentives are being clicked on and how far along on the buyer’s journey are the leads clicking on them? Do readers have a stronger click-through rate before or after your webinars (after-webinar activity should be higher)?

Sales Meetings and Demo Bookings

Every webinar that results in a spike in sales meetings and demo bookings is considered a success. When leads make further inquiries and book an appointment, it means your webinars are on the right track in engaging audiences and leaving them ready to commit to the next stage in the buying process. Utilize tips and marketing strategies from  several webinar examples to help you learn new ways you can boost demos and sales meetings.

Wrapping up

Webinar marketing lays the foundation for a successful webinar by targeting the right demographic, generating buzz around the event, and continuing the conversation after it ends. While pre-webinar communications are critical to acquire registrants and encourage them to attend, you also need to give attention to your post-event follow-up to drive home your message and convince viewers to convert. Monitor relevant metrics like the ones mentioned in this article to learn which efforts are successful and which aren’t, then refine your strategy to see higher attendance and conversion rates with each subsequent webinar.

The goal of virtual events is to make sales and grow your brand, and with the right webinar platform supporting you, you can achieve a stellar ROI from both your webinars and your marketing activities. See how Demio’s interactive elements, engagement tools, and analytics features can work for you by getting started for free or booking a demo today.

Frequently Asked Questions About Webinar Marketing

What are the best webinar platforms?

The best webinar platform is one that has the customization and interactive features you desire for creating webinars as well as an easy-to-use format. Demio has a user-friendly interface that makes creating webinars as a beginner or expert host simple.

How do I create attractive webinar titles?

Be explicit and succinct in your webinar titles. Similarly, avoid generic, vague, or salesy word choice. People should be able to grasp quickly what the webinar will cover and how they’ll benefit after reading the title alone.

What is a Good Cadence for My Email Drip Campaign?

To engage your audience effectively (and without spamming them), time your email drip campaign so you send a few emails each week. Leading up to webinars, send communications as often as once a day or more. Post-webinar communication, meanwhile, can be less frequent but should still engage audiences a few times a week.