How to promote a webinar to increase attendance rate

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Matt Francis - Founder at Cloudpresenter
Post by
Matt Francis
Last updated :
February 7, 2024
 | 20 min read

Creating a webinar landing page to accept registration is easy. Besides the content and registration page, the success of your webinar depends on the strategies you use to promote it. And that's where the real challenge lies. It doesn't matter if you are hosting automated webinars or live events. Without any registrants, you will not get good value out of it.

Perhaps you may have planned out a way to measure your webinar success. Through this post, you'll discover some of the best webinar promotion tactics proven to work across different industries. By putting these webinar promotion tips to work, you'll be on the right path toward achieving your webinar goals.

Whether you are looking for paid or free promotion strategies, you will find some suitable options in this post.

#1: Plan the promotion timeline before you host your webinar

Best Webinar Software, Video Conferencing Software, Virtual Meeting Platform, and Virtual Event Platform

Webinar promotion timeline refers to the time you have to promote the event before the hosting date. Depending on your chosen strategies, you may adopt an aggressive or conservative approach. If you adopt an aggressive approach involving different promotion channels, a shorter timeline might work for you, and vice versa.

However, what I have experienced about the aggressive approach is that the cost of promoting your webinar might be too high. Irrespective of the chosen approach, the most important thing is to plan for sufficient time to reach your attendance goal.

In addition to planning the promotion timeline, you should also set out a promotion budget based on the number of selected lead generation channels. Interestingly, choosing more promotion channels with an aggressive approach will cost you more money. And that's why you should consider your overall budget before you host your webinar.

#2: Tap into your employee network to promote webinars

Your employees have active profiles across different social media platforms. Inside those channels, these employees are connected with friends, family members, and colleagues who might be perfect targets for your upcoming webinar. The task is to engage your employees to share the registration page links. Since your employees' family members and friends trust them so well, the chances of clicking the registration links are usually high.

Moreover, tapping into your employee network is one of the best free webinar promotion tactics that won't cost you any money. But then, the success of this tactic depends on the number of employees and the size of their networks.

#3: Promote your webinar on traffic generating website pages

Best Webinar Software, Video Conferencing Software, Virtual Meeting Platform, and Virtual Event Platform

Assuming your company has been leveraging search engine optimization and content marketing to generate targeted website visitors, you'll have considerable traffic volume now. Whatever the case, some website pages are likely to have higher traffic volume than others. And that's where you should look for an effective webinar promotion strategy. Getting some targeted prospects to register for your webinar from this source involves the following tasks –

  • Identify the page generating the highest traffic volume
  • Embed your webinar registration form inside those identified pages
  • Add more internal links point to the pages
  • Track registrations from these specific pages

#4: Promote the webinar landing page to your exiting email list subscribers

Best Webinar Software, Video Conferencing Software, Virtual Meeting Platform, and Virtual Event Platform

Before the date you plan to host a webinar, consider sending the registration landing page link to your existing email list subscribers. These subscribers already trust your brand. Hence, the likelihood of getting them to sign up for your webinar is very high. Once again, sending to existing email subscribers is one of the best free promotion strategies you can try before the event date.

If you want to drive registrations from an existing subscriber list, one of the best practices you should consider is email A/B testing. Through strategic split testing, you can position your brand to get the best results from webinar marketing. One key benefit of split-testing your email campaigns is that you never know which segment will bring better results than others. Some of the core email variables you can test when it's time to promote webinars include the following –

  1. Email subject line
  2. Email body copy
  3. Value propositions
  4. Audience segment
  5. Inclusion of social proof
  6. Call to action

#5: Leverage niche relevant newsletters to advertise your webinar and drive registration

Newsletter advertising is another proven channel you can leverage to promote your next webinar or increase the webinar attendance rate. The thing about newsletter Ads is that niche relevance often makes it profitable, especially when everything is aligned correctly. Moreover, you can send emails and measure the direct outcome of this webinar marketing channel. Regardless of your niche or industry, you'll find that some newsletters with higher responsive audiences will sell some premium advertising spaces.

Depending on the webinar platform you choose, you could get access to advanced webinar analytics integration that will give you insights into the newsletter Ads performance.

#6: Use traffic generating guest posts to promote on-demand webinars

Hosting a successful webinar doesn't have to depend on your website traffic, email list, or limited advertising budget. Assuming your email subscriber base or website traffic volume is limited, that should be a reason to explore the existing Audience built by other brands. Interestingly, one of the best ways to promote your webinar beyond social media platforms is to write and publish guest blog posts.

But there is one way to guarantee you'll get good results. That approach is to select traffic-generating websites only. If the chosen websites are not getting sufficient traffic volume, you won't get anything out of your efforts. Besides selecting sites with high traffic volume, you should consider the niche relevance.

How related are the guest posting sites to your niche or industry? Below are some Google search operators for finding guest posting opportunities in your niche.

  • "write for us" KEYWORD
  • "become an author" KEYWORD
  • "guest post" KEYWORD
  • "guest article" KEYWORD
  • "become a contributor" KEYWORD
  • "guest post guidelines" KEYWORD
  • Inurl: "write-for-us" KEYWORD
  • Inurl: "guest-post" KEYWORD
  • Inurl: "become-a-contributor" KEYWORD
  • Inurl: "guest-post-guidelines" KEYWORD
  • "this is a guest contribution" KEYWORD
  • "contributing writer" KEYWORD
  • "guest author" KEYWORD
  • "The following guest post" KEYWORD
  • "guest blogger" KEYWORD

#7: Leverage existing influencer audience to promote the landing page for your webinar

Influencer marketing is leveraging other people's social media influence and existing Audiences to market your product, service, or online course. One key benefit of influencer marketing is the opportunity to tap into other people's existing Audience instead of building from scratch. Perhaps we all know that building from scratch takes time and money.

Whether you are promoting a product, service, online course, or webinar, one vital thing to bear in mind is the need for tight alignment between the influencer's existing Audience and the thing you want to sell. If there is a mismatch in between, you'll not get the best results from your promotional efforts.

Regarding effective influencer marketing, the best three channels to explore are listed below.

YouTube subscribers – Collaborating with YouTubers in your niche is one way to leverage influencer marketing for effective webinar promotion. Look for video content creators in your niche with a considerable subscriber base. Host an expert interview and promote your webinar.

Facebook groups – Go to Facebook and search for active groups with sizable audiences in your niche. Negotiate with the group owners and admins for the best ways to promote your webinars.

Instagram followers – Instagram is another exciting destination where people in your niche actively follow the influencers in your niche. Check the influencer's account activity statistics to gauge audience engagement before paying for any promotional service.

#8: Write attractive social media posts to improve your promotional efforts

Best Webinar Software, Video Conferencing Software, Virtual Meeting Platform, and Virtual Event Platform

The success of this webinar promotion tactic will depend on the size of your social media followers. If you don't have a sizable audience that engages with your company or brand page, free posting on social media will not get you the desired results. However, when your company has built up sizable page followers or group members, posting will attract some people to attend your webinars. Besides, it is worth exploring how you can post to other relevant social media pages and groups.

#9: Engage guest speakers to promote your webinar on social media livestream

Regardless of the marketing context, live video content often records more engagement than simple texts. The reason is very clear. Video content triggers emotion and motivates people towards specific actions. And there have been many research reports to back it up.

For example, a study published on the MotionBox website reported that companies that use video content enjoy a 34% higher conversion rate than their counterparts. That's one reason you should use live-streamed videos to engage an audience and promote your upcoming event.

Please note that getting the best results from this promotion channel requires a strategic alignment between your webinar topic and the topic of the social media livestream.

#11: Use paid ads to achieve higher webinar marketing conversion rate

Best Webinar Software, Video Conferencing Software, Virtual Meeting Platform, and Virtual Event Platform

Generating quality leads you can convert into paying customers from a webinar requires consistent and effective promotion strategies. Based on what we have experienced at CloudPresenter, paid advertising is one of the best ways to get fast results within a short time. Depending on the chosen best webinar platform, your webinar promotion advertisements could start running and generating results within 24 – 72 hours after approval. Below are some benefits of webinar promotion with paid advertising.

Deep audience targeting – With free webinar promotion methods, targeting options are always limited. When you use paid advertising platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, you can promote a webinar by targeting prospects based on their location (country, state, city), age, gender, industry, niche, business model, job title, and interest-defining keywords.

Conversion A/B testing: Most paid advertising platforms will give you some great features to run A/B tests. Through such a test, you'll discover the best combination of advertising variables that will give you the highest conversion rate from your promotional efforts.

Channel performance comparison: Unlike free promotion strategies, paid Ads will make it easy to test and compare the selected channels based on your preferred webinar success metrics. For example, platform A might deliver the highest volume of B2B sales leads while platform B outperforms others in terms of conversion rate and webinar-generated revenue. With the insights gained from the comparison, you can start reallocating your resources to the top-performing channels.

#12: Invest in strategic audience retargeting to promote your upcoming webinar

Retargeting is creating paid advertisements to retarget and attract prospects who have visited your main company website, webinar landing page, or blog posts. Considering that less than 2% of your website visitors will care enough to click the call to action button, strategic retargeting will help you bring back a considerable percentage of the other 98% who visited but never took any action.

Best ad retargeting platforms

  1. AdRoll
  2. Retargeter
  3. Criteo
  4. Google ads
  5. Twitter tailored audience
  6. Facebook ads
  7. Wunderkind
  8. Sizmek
  9. Meteora

Using some of these platforms, you can retarget prospects who have visited your webinar registration landing page, pricing page, blog posts, or automated webinar funnel. Besides, one benefit of retargeting website visitors is that advertising is usually cheaper than targeting strangers who have never heard about your brand. Check this page for retargeting case studies with insightful lessons.

Conclusion

Before leaving this page, one key takeaway you should remember is that the promotion strategies shared in this post will have different levels of effectiveness. If you have a lean budget, start with the free promotion tactics. When you explore such channels, you won't need to spend money out of pocket.

On the other hand, getting the best results as soon as possible requires setting a definite budget to promote your webinars. Regardless of the budget size, what matters most is the effectiveness of your efforts. As noted earlier, doing some A/B testing will help you discover the combination of variables that will deliver the best results. Unfortunately, you cannot leverage the power of split testing with most of the free promotion tactics shared in this post.

Moreover, it is better to select and focus on a few platforms or channels instead of trying to get registrations from all these channels simultaneously. Most importantly, set a sufficient timeline to plan and promote your virtual event. Finally, consider using the best marketing analytics tools to track the highest-performing promotion channels and strategies.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a good webinar attendance rate?

A satisfactory webinar attendance rate typically ranges from 30% to 40%, though factors like audience size, industry, and promotion methods influence the benchmark. Aim for continuous improvement by analyzing past performance and implementing engagement strategies.

How do you encourage people to attend a webinar?

Offer exclusive content, highlight key takeaways, and emphasize the limited availability of valuable insights. Utilize personalized invitations, provide clear benefits, and send timely reminders to boost attendance rates.

What is the best way to promote a webinar?

Employ a multi-channel approach, including email marketing, social media promotion, and collaboration with industry influencers. Utilize compelling visuals, clear messaging, and targeted advertising to increase visibility and drive registrations effectively.

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February 7, 2024
How to promote a webinar to increase attendance rate
Supercharge your webinar success with Cloudpresenter strategies. Explore 10+ tips to promote a webinar, increase registrations, and boost the webinar attendance rate.
Matt Francis
Founder

Table of Contents

Creating a webinar landing page to accept registration is easy. Besides the content and registration page, the success of your webinar depends on the strategies you use to promote it. And that's where the real challenge lies. It doesn't matter if you are hosting automated webinars or live events. Without any registrants, you will not get good value out of it.

Perhaps you may have planned out a way to measure your webinar success. Through this post, you'll discover some of the best webinar promotion tactics proven to work across different industries. By putting these webinar promotion tips to work, you'll be on the right path toward achieving your webinar goals.

Whether you are looking for paid or free promotion strategies, you will find some suitable options in this post.

#1: Plan the promotion timeline before you host your webinar

Best Webinar Software, Video Conferencing Software, Virtual Meeting Platform, and Virtual Event Platform

Webinar promotion timeline refers to the time you have to promote the event before the hosting date. Depending on your chosen strategies, you may adopt an aggressive or conservative approach. If you adopt an aggressive approach involving different promotion channels, a shorter timeline might work for you, and vice versa.

However, what I have experienced about the aggressive approach is that the cost of promoting your webinar might be too high. Irrespective of the chosen approach, the most important thing is to plan for sufficient time to reach your attendance goal.

In addition to planning the promotion timeline, you should also set out a promotion budget based on the number of selected lead generation channels. Interestingly, choosing more promotion channels with an aggressive approach will cost you more money. And that's why you should consider your overall budget before you host your webinar.

#2: Tap into your employee network to promote webinars

Your employees have active profiles across different social media platforms. Inside those channels, these employees are connected with friends, family members, and colleagues who might be perfect targets for your upcoming webinar. The task is to engage your employees to share the registration page links. Since your employees' family members and friends trust them so well, the chances of clicking the registration links are usually high.

Moreover, tapping into your employee network is one of the best free webinar promotion tactics that won't cost you any money. But then, the success of this tactic depends on the number of employees and the size of their networks.

#3: Promote your webinar on traffic generating website pages

Best Webinar Software, Video Conferencing Software, Virtual Meeting Platform, and Virtual Event Platform

Assuming your company has been leveraging search engine optimization and content marketing to generate targeted website visitors, you'll have considerable traffic volume now. Whatever the case, some website pages are likely to have higher traffic volume than others. And that's where you should look for an effective webinar promotion strategy. Getting some targeted prospects to register for your webinar from this source involves the following tasks –

  • Identify the page generating the highest traffic volume
  • Embed your webinar registration form inside those identified pages
  • Add more internal links point to the pages
  • Track registrations from these specific pages

#4: Promote the webinar landing page to your exiting email list subscribers

Best Webinar Software, Video Conferencing Software, Virtual Meeting Platform, and Virtual Event Platform

Before the date you plan to host a webinar, consider sending the registration landing page link to your existing email list subscribers. These subscribers already trust your brand. Hence, the likelihood of getting them to sign up for your webinar is very high. Once again, sending to existing email subscribers is one of the best free promotion strategies you can try before the event date.

If you want to drive registrations from an existing subscriber list, one of the best practices you should consider is email A/B testing. Through strategic split testing, you can position your brand to get the best results from webinar marketing. One key benefit of split-testing your email campaigns is that you never know which segment will bring better results than others. Some of the core email variables you can test when it's time to promote webinars include the following –

  1. Email subject line
  2. Email body copy
  3. Value propositions
  4. Audience segment
  5. Inclusion of social proof
  6. Call to action

#5: Leverage niche relevant newsletters to advertise your webinar and drive registration

Newsletter advertising is another proven channel you can leverage to promote your next webinar or increase the webinar attendance rate. The thing about newsletter Ads is that niche relevance often makes it profitable, especially when everything is aligned correctly. Moreover, you can send emails and measure the direct outcome of this webinar marketing channel. Regardless of your niche or industry, you'll find that some newsletters with higher responsive audiences will sell some premium advertising spaces.

Depending on the webinar platform you choose, you could get access to advanced webinar analytics integration that will give you insights into the newsletter Ads performance.

#6: Use traffic generating guest posts to promote on-demand webinars

Hosting a successful webinar doesn't have to depend on your website traffic, email list, or limited advertising budget. Assuming your email subscriber base or website traffic volume is limited, that should be a reason to explore the existing Audience built by other brands. Interestingly, one of the best ways to promote your webinar beyond social media platforms is to write and publish guest blog posts.

But there is one way to guarantee you'll get good results. That approach is to select traffic-generating websites only. If the chosen websites are not getting sufficient traffic volume, you won't get anything out of your efforts. Besides selecting sites with high traffic volume, you should consider the niche relevance.

How related are the guest posting sites to your niche or industry? Below are some Google search operators for finding guest posting opportunities in your niche.

  • "write for us" KEYWORD
  • "become an author" KEYWORD
  • "guest post" KEYWORD
  • "guest article" KEYWORD
  • "become a contributor" KEYWORD
  • "guest post guidelines" KEYWORD
  • Inurl: "write-for-us" KEYWORD
  • Inurl: "guest-post" KEYWORD
  • Inurl: "become-a-contributor" KEYWORD
  • Inurl: "guest-post-guidelines" KEYWORD
  • "this is a guest contribution" KEYWORD
  • "contributing writer" KEYWORD
  • "guest author" KEYWORD
  • "The following guest post" KEYWORD
  • "guest blogger" KEYWORD

#7: Leverage existing influencer audience to promote the landing page for your webinar

Influencer marketing is leveraging other people's social media influence and existing Audiences to market your product, service, or online course. One key benefit of influencer marketing is the opportunity to tap into other people's existing Audience instead of building from scratch. Perhaps we all know that building from scratch takes time and money.

Whether you are promoting a product, service, online course, or webinar, one vital thing to bear in mind is the need for tight alignment between the influencer's existing Audience and the thing you want to sell. If there is a mismatch in between, you'll not get the best results from your promotional efforts.

Regarding effective influencer marketing, the best three channels to explore are listed below.

YouTube subscribers – Collaborating with YouTubers in your niche is one way to leverage influencer marketing for effective webinar promotion. Look for video content creators in your niche with a considerable subscriber base. Host an expert interview and promote your webinar.

Facebook groups – Go to Facebook and search for active groups with sizable audiences in your niche. Negotiate with the group owners and admins for the best ways to promote your webinars.

Instagram followers – Instagram is another exciting destination where people in your niche actively follow the influencers in your niche. Check the influencer's account activity statistics to gauge audience engagement before paying for any promotional service.

#8: Write attractive social media posts to improve your promotional efforts

Best Webinar Software, Video Conferencing Software, Virtual Meeting Platform, and Virtual Event Platform

The success of this webinar promotion tactic will depend on the size of your social media followers. If you don't have a sizable audience that engages with your company or brand page, free posting on social media will not get you the desired results. However, when your company has built up sizable page followers or group members, posting will attract some people to attend your webinars. Besides, it is worth exploring how you can post to other relevant social media pages and groups.

#9: Engage guest speakers to promote your webinar on social media livestream

Regardless of the marketing context, live video content often records more engagement than simple texts. The reason is very clear. Video content triggers emotion and motivates people towards specific actions. And there have been many research reports to back it up.

For example, a study published on the MotionBox website reported that companies that use video content enjoy a 34% higher conversion rate than their counterparts. That's one reason you should use live-streamed videos to engage an audience and promote your upcoming event.

Please note that getting the best results from this promotion channel requires a strategic alignment between your webinar topic and the topic of the social media livestream.

#11: Use paid ads to achieve higher webinar marketing conversion rate

Best Webinar Software, Video Conferencing Software, Virtual Meeting Platform, and Virtual Event Platform

Generating quality leads you can convert into paying customers from a webinar requires consistent and effective promotion strategies. Based on what we have experienced at CloudPresenter, paid advertising is one of the best ways to get fast results within a short time. Depending on the chosen best webinar platform, your webinar promotion advertisements could start running and generating results within 24 – 72 hours after approval. Below are some benefits of webinar promotion with paid advertising.

Deep audience targeting – With free webinar promotion methods, targeting options are always limited. When you use paid advertising platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, you can promote a webinar by targeting prospects based on their location (country, state, city), age, gender, industry, niche, business model, job title, and interest-defining keywords.

Conversion A/B testing: Most paid advertising platforms will give you some great features to run A/B tests. Through such a test, you'll discover the best combination of advertising variables that will give you the highest conversion rate from your promotional efforts.

Channel performance comparison: Unlike free promotion strategies, paid Ads will make it easy to test and compare the selected channels based on your preferred webinar success metrics. For example, platform A might deliver the highest volume of B2B sales leads while platform B outperforms others in terms of conversion rate and webinar-generated revenue. With the insights gained from the comparison, you can start reallocating your resources to the top-performing channels.

#12: Invest in strategic audience retargeting to promote your upcoming webinar

Retargeting is creating paid advertisements to retarget and attract prospects who have visited your main company website, webinar landing page, or blog posts. Considering that less than 2% of your website visitors will care enough to click the call to action button, strategic retargeting will help you bring back a considerable percentage of the other 98% who visited but never took any action.

Best ad retargeting platforms

  1. AdRoll
  2. Retargeter
  3. Criteo
  4. Google ads
  5. Twitter tailored audience
  6. Facebook ads
  7. Wunderkind
  8. Sizmek
  9. Meteora

Using some of these platforms, you can retarget prospects who have visited your webinar registration landing page, pricing page, blog posts, or automated webinar funnel. Besides, one benefit of retargeting website visitors is that advertising is usually cheaper than targeting strangers who have never heard about your brand. Check this page for retargeting case studies with insightful lessons.

Conclusion

Before leaving this page, one key takeaway you should remember is that the promotion strategies shared in this post will have different levels of effectiveness. If you have a lean budget, start with the free promotion tactics. When you explore such channels, you won't need to spend money out of pocket.

On the other hand, getting the best results as soon as possible requires setting a definite budget to promote your webinars. Regardless of the budget size, what matters most is the effectiveness of your efforts. As noted earlier, doing some A/B testing will help you discover the combination of variables that will deliver the best results. Unfortunately, you cannot leverage the power of split testing with most of the free promotion tactics shared in this post.

Moreover, it is better to select and focus on a few platforms or channels instead of trying to get registrations from all these channels simultaneously. Most importantly, set a sufficient timeline to plan and promote your virtual event. Finally, consider using the best marketing analytics tools to track the highest-performing promotion channels and strategies.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a good webinar attendance rate?

A satisfactory webinar attendance rate typically ranges from 30% to 40%, though factors like audience size, industry, and promotion methods influence the benchmark. Aim for continuous improvement by analyzing past performance and implementing engagement strategies.

How do you encourage people to attend a webinar?

Offer exclusive content, highlight key takeaways, and emphasize the limited availability of valuable insights. Utilize personalized invitations, provide clear benefits, and send timely reminders to boost attendance rates.

What is the best way to promote a webinar?

Employ a multi-channel approach, including email marketing, social media promotion, and collaboration with industry influencers. Utilize compelling visuals, clear messaging, and targeted advertising to increase visibility and drive registrations effectively.

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