Webinar promotion strategies: How to successfully promote and market your webinar

In today's digital era, webinars have emerged as a powerful tool for B2B brands to connect with their target audience, share valuable knowledge, and generate leads. However, organizing a successful webinar is just one part of a much larger equation. 

To ensure its success, marketers must also invest time and effort into promoting and marketing each webinar effectively. After all, a webinar is only effective if people show up. Did you know that on average, webinars have an attendance rate of roughly only 40%? So, how exactly do you get butts in (virtual) seats? It boils down to your webinar promotion strategy.

In this article, we’ll explore a range of proven strategies and techniques that can help you maximize the reach and impact of your webinar. From leveraging social media platforms to crafting email nurture campaigns, let’s dive into the essential steps to spreading awareness, building excitement, and properly promoting your next virtual event.

8 effective ways to promote a webinar

A webinar (or better yet, webinar series!) can be the perfect cornerstone event to bring together your marketing initiatives and naturally guide leads through your funnel. Treat your webinars like you would an exciting product or service launch. Think about who your audience is, how they behave, what engages them, and where to reach them. From blog and email to LinkedIn and beyond, here are 8 proven ways to promote your next webinar.

1. Write a blog post promoting the webinar

How early on do you start planting the seeds for your next webinar, you ask? Ideally, you’ll want to start ramping things up about 6-8 weeks prior to the go-live date.

Strengthening your website SEO around your webinar subject matter is an important first step. Social media posts come and go, but an SEO strategy can organically draw people to your website for years to come. To build authority around your upcoming webinar topic, publish an SEO-optimized and engaging blog post that is relevant to your webinar subject.

Let’s say your webinar is titled “Navigating the B2B Buyer's Journey: Insights on Effective Sales Funnel Management”. You’ll want to do some SEO research with a tool like Semrush to uncover what questions your audience has on this topic and how they’re searching for the answers. Perhaps you notice throughout your research that your audience is particularly interested in how to develop lead funnel strategies. By publishing a blog post titled “The Ultimate Guide to Developing Effective Lead Funnel Strategies”, you can build your brand’s credibility on this topic, boost your organic keyword rankings, and start engaging your audience.

After your webinar has aired, keep your blog content evergreen by updating the call to action (CTA) to direct the reader to watch the webinar recording. You can even update the content to include top takeaways, quotes, or video embeds as well. 

2. Create a landing page

About 5-6 weeks out from the webinar you should publish a landing page on your website. With an optimized landing page, you can generate traction, track registrations, and create a positive pre-event experience for your audience. This page will hold significant weight in your promotion strategy, as it serves as the gateway to engage your audience and entice them to sign up for your webinar. To make it effective, craft a clear and attention-grabbing headline accompanied by an eye-catching image or video. 

Use strong CTA copy that prompts visitors to register, and keep the registration process simple with an easy-to-fill form. If your team has the bandwidth, consider offering a resource up-front — such as a free ebook, checklist, or report, to provide value off the bat and incentivize sign-ups. Don’t forget to update your blog from the previous section with a CTA & registration button for your webinar that leads to your landing page.

3. Submit the webinar to third-party event pages

Start leveraging the power of third-party event pages about 4-6 weeks out from your webinar. Use Eventbrite, Meetups, Facebook Events, and LinkedIn Events to share your webinar and it easy for your target audience to register. 

LinkedIn Live Events, in particular, is a game-changer when it comes to hosting and promoting webinars. With a vast network of professionals, brands, and event pages, you can reach the right people for your B2B webinar quickly on LinkedIn. Use LinkedIn's event promotion features to enable precise targeting and visibility, ensuring your webinar gets noticed by the right people.

4. Build an email marketing campaign to promote the webinar

Though it’s been around for decades, email marketing remains an effective way to convert leads. Email campaigns allow for direct and personalized communication with your target audience, leads, and customers, ensuring that your webinar invitation lands directly in their inboxes. This level of personalization helps create a sense of exclusivity and importance around the event, increasing attendance rates. 

Additionally, email campaigns enable you to leverage existing customer or subscriber lists, tapping into a pool of individuals who have already shown interest in your products or thought leadership. This targeted approach ensures that your webinar reaches a relevant and engaged audience, increasing the chances of conversion and generating quality leads.

About 4 weeks out from your webinar, create an email series for your event that includes:

• 1 email with the blog post + a call to action to sign-up for the webinar (4 weeks out)
• 1  email that introduces the speakers and teases the webinar content (1-2 weeks out)
• 1 email reminder 24 hours before the webinar
• 1 email reminder 60 minutes before the webinar
• 1 email right after the event that includes the webinar recording

Once the email series is complete, consider adding registered individuals to a nurture campaign to keep them engaged with your content.

Need a little extra boost in registrations? Incentivize webinar attendance by including things like a raffle giveaway, customized recommendations, discounts or special offers, a free trial, or complimentary swag.

5. Publish content on social media

About 4 weeks out from your webinar, start publishing a series of social media posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok that include important details about your webinar, such as the title, date, time, topic, and guest speakers. 

Depending on the social platform, you can link to your landing page and blog post to drive registrations and interest. Build energy and momentum with your followers around the webinar topic by posting and engaging with discussion prompts — you can even ask your followers what questions they have on the topic to guide the flow of your event. 

Will guest speakers be joining your webinar? With their approval, tag their social media handles, their companies’ accounts, and include their headshots in your posts to drive greater reach. Considering using hashtags to get your posts in front of non-followers as well.

By leveraging social media channels, you’ll amplify the reach and engagement of your content and get your webinar in front of new audiences.

6. Launch paid ads

YouTube, Google, and social media ads are effective ways to target a new audience — with the largest benefit being the ability to tailor who sees them. About 2 weeks prior to your webinar, launch a series of ads targeted at your customer personas who would likely find value in the event. Build your ad audience based on key demographics like location, age, industry, gender identity, role, interests, etc.

We recommend Google Display and LinkedIn ads to promote a webinar. Here are some benefits of each:

Google Display benefits:

• Display ads offer flexible budgeting options, allowing you to set your desired spend and optimize your campaign to achieve the best return on investment (ROI) for your webinar promotion.
• You can run A/B tests to experiment with different ad variations, headlines, images, or call-to-action buttons, allowing you to refine your campaign and optimize for better results.
• Remarketing capabilities allow you to reach individuals who have previously interacted with your website or shown interest in your offerings, effectively reminding them of your webinar and encouraging them to sign up.
• With precise targeting options, you can narrow down your audience based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and more, ensuring your ads are shown to individuals most likely to be interested in your webinar topic.

LinkedIn Ad benefits:

• LinkedIn Ads allow precise targeting based on professional criteria such as job title, industry, company size, seniority, and more. This ensures that your webinar ads are shown to a highly relevant and engaged professional audience.
• LinkedIn is a platform known for its strong B2B presence. Promoting your webinar on LinkedIn enables you to reach decision-makers, professionals, and potential clients who are actively seeking valuable industry insights and professional development opportunities.
• Networking opportunities: LinkedIn Ads not only drive webinar registrations but also offer networking opportunities. Attendees can connect with you and other participants, fostering professional relationships and potential business collaborations.

Set your budgets low at first, then refine & optimize your ads on a daily or weekly basis to get the most bang (er, registrations) for your buck.

7. Cross-promote the webinar with partners and speakers

Don’t overlook the power of your network. About two weeks pre-event, start cross-promoting your event with a business or thought leader who shares a similar audience or is in a relevant industry. This is an excellent little-to-no-cost tactic that will amplify your webinar and provide some social proof for your company and content.

Let’s say you’re an HR software brand offering a webinar to teach managers how to foster higher team engagement and psychological safety. Work with a partner company that sells an employee engagement tool. You have the same audience – managers in mid-sized or large enterprises – but you aren’t competitors.

Make it easy for your partner band to cross-promote your webinar. Offer to promote their product to your audience in exchange for their company promoting your webinar with their audience. Create assets like graphics and suggested copy for social media and email templates to easily tackle any cross-promotion hesitation.

8. Promote your recorded webinar

After your webinar (phew, you did it!), you’ll need to shift your promotional strategy from driving webinar registrations to sharing the recorded webinar.

Here’s how to set yourself up for a smooth transition into the post-webinar promotion:

• Build a social media queue for post-event promotion of your recorded webinar that you can quickly turn on after the webinar.
• Build an email nurture campaign that you can turn on post-event to continue connecting with attendees and those who registered. 
• Adjust your landing page copy to reflect the webinar is now “On demand.” Keep the same URL, so the links you used to promote pre-event are still valid.
• Change the language on your blog post call to action (CTA) from “Register” to “Access Now.”

Webinar your way to success

In conclusion, effective webinar promotion and marketing strategies are essential for maximizing the success of your online events. By integrating your marketing efforts and leveraging channels like social media, email campaigns, landing pages, third-party event listings, and targeted advertising, you can build anticipation, reach a wider audience, and drive registrations. 

So, take these strategies and embark on your journey to promoting and hosting impactful webinars that leave a lasting impression, generate leads, and grow your brand.

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