Timing and planning the webinar
So, you’re planning on running a webinar, and you’re thinking about ways to maximize its reach. First order of business is: getting organized and planning all your tasks. In this section, we’ll give a few guidelines about properly timing your webinar so you have time to properly promote it.
Start promoting at least 2 weeks in advance
To properly promote a webinar, you’ll need to prepare things in advance and start the marketing push around 2 weeks in advance. That’s espcially true if you follow the tips on this page, which contain social media posts and reminders to send. They will work best if they are carefully timed.
Tip from the Livestorm team:
Launch the marketing push on Social Media 2 weeks in advance. Launch the email invites 1 week in advance.
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Ideal webinar duration: 45 minutes to 1 hour
The ideal webinar duration is only yours to decide. But we’ve seen our customers get more success with relatively short sessions. When it comes to online videos, going over the 1 hour mark is generally to avoid, bar a few exception.
Tip from the Livestorm team:
For bigger topics, you can always break up your webinars into several shorter sessions. Conversely, a shorter duration (of around 30 minutes) may be ideal for other use cases, like product demos for example.
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Best days to host your webinar: Wednesday, Thursday
Wednesdays and Thursdays are typically when you’ll see more webinar attendance. Conversely, avoid weekends (for obvious reasons) and Fridays as that’s when we measure the lowest participation rate.
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Best days to send invites: Tuesdays, Wednesdays
In addition to promoting 2 weeks in advance, the ideal days to send invitations to your webinar are Tuesdays and Wednesdays as you’ll see better open rates and conversions on average.
Evergreen content
Evergreen content is information that will likely not change, or change very little over time. Creating evergreen content has several benefits. Mainly, its “create it once and don’t think about it again” nature means more efficiency for you. Having reliable evergreen content on your website is also great for SEO as these pages typically tend to rank higher than blog posts, due to their timeless nature.
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Add a webinar section to your website
Create a page on your site that automatically updates with the upcoming webinar sessions for your company.
Tip from the Livestorm team:
If you have several upcoming webinar sessions, try to categorize them to bring clarity to the list.
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Include your upcoming webinars in your company emails
You, your employees, and your company are already sending emails every day. Either automatically via your service, or manually from your own email box. Adding your upcoming webinars page to your signature will increase your partners and customer’s awareness of these webinars and can grow your audience in the long run.
Tip from the Livestorm team:
Avoid clutter in your signature. We like to keep it clean with no images and only a few links and one event.
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Embed upcoming events at relevant places on your website or blog
If you can, create a widget from your upcoming webinars page and embed it at strategic places on your website, blog, or even specific articles in your blog.
Tip from the Livestorm team:
If you can, use webinar categories or tagging to only show the relevant events in the embed. (eg: only show your upcoming demos, or upcoming sessions in a series of webinars, etc)
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Embed the webinar registration form
Directing people to your webinar registration page is great… But in specific contexts, it can be even better to just have the registration form embedded into another page. For example in a blog post announcing the webinar, you could directly embed the form to drive more registrations and avoid losing people by directing them to another page.
Content creation on owned media
Creating content on your own blog and social media is a great way to get people interested in your webinar and increase the number of registrants.
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Announce the webinar on your blog
Depending on your blog editorial line, you’ll want to either post an article that is directly promoting the webinar, or write on a topic directly linked to your upcoming webinar and add a section in it to promote the webinar.
Tip from the Livestorm team:
The blog posts are also a great spot to embed you upcoming webinars if you can.
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Sharing on social media
No matter how obvious this one seems, we’re seeing a surprisingly high number of our clients underestimating it, or simply not doing it at all. Posting the announcement tweet and following it up with a few reminders can really help raise awareness on your upcoming webinar.
Tip from the Livestorm team:
Share “behind the scenes” photos when promoting the webinar on social media.
Better Webinar Software
Bring more people to your webinars with Livestorm.
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Add a banner to your social media accounts
Depending on how you manage your accounts, this may or may not be possible for you. But what better way to give visibility to your upcoming webinar than by instantly showing it to visitors of your social media accounts?
Tip from the Livestorm team:
Create all the promotion images you’ll need at once. This avoids going back and forth on the image editor every time new material is needed.
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Pin the announcement tweet or Facebook post
The first social media communication post you create should contain all the information needed so that you can reuse it during all the time preceding the webinar. One of the ways to reuse it is to simply pin it to your Twitter account and/or Facebook page. This will effectively make it the first communication visitors see from you.
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Write a LinkedIn post
The algorithms powering LinkedIn’s feed are fairly easy to use to your advantage. With just a few likes and comments to give your post a headstart, you may be propelling its visibility by a few thousands of views.
Tip from the Livestorm team:
If time is the constraint here, you may repurpose the article you wrote for your blog instead of writing a new one.
Community outreach
Trying to get the word out on the internet can be a great way to kickstart your webinar promotion. If the webinar is addressing a niche market, it’s important to do the legwork ahead of time in order to introduce yourself and your business to each communities you want to target.
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Send a newsletter
Sending good newsletters can be tricky, because there are many faux-pas to avoid. But stick to these rules of thumb to stay in the safe zone: * Only send it to people who have an interest in your webinar’s topic. * Make sure your list is clean and people willingly joined it. * Send a highly polished email. That is, polished in its wording AND design. * Personalize the email as much as possible.
Tip from the Livestorm team:
Email personalization directly correlates with the ammount of data you have available with your list. Look at ways augment the information with important tidbits about each contact. Clearbit enrichment can do it, but you may consider manually adding specific paragraphs depending on your sample size.
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Contact influencers
Influencer marketing is a topic in itself. But no matter your webinar’s topic, there is probably a community of incluencers that would be happy to talk about it. Depending on the industry and scope of the webinar, perhaps considering a paid promotion partnership with some of these influencers would be worth considering.
Tip from the Livestorm team:
Making a joint webinar with an influencer or can increase the stickiness of your webinar.
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Partner with companies around your space
For webinar promotion and webinar ideas alike, partnering with companies with a similar customer base than yours can work great. This way you can host a webinar on a topic connected to your business while having an expert talk about it. This will also work great for joint promotion as the other company will also promote your webinar.
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Spread the word in online communities
The internet is full of communities, gathering around any topic you can tink of. Be it on LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, or specialized sites, there are communities out there that will be interested in your webinar’s topic. But be mindful not to promote your webinar aggressively and right from the start. The right idea would be to join the community and actively participate as an interested member, and to provide added value when talking about your upcoming webinar.
Paid advertising
Depending on your use case and the scope of the webinar(s) you want to promote, ad spend may be relevant. Webinars are very much like events (they are online events after all!), so similar tactics can be used. Especially when it comes to collecting registrants information directly from the ad rather than redirecting them to your webinar’s landing page.
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Promote using image banners
As we’ve seen about social media, images are a powerful way to promote a webinar. That’s especially true if they give an idea of the webinar’s setup, or a feel for the atmosphere viewers can expect.
Tip from the Livestorm team:
To be effective, find the ad networks that allow you to target the right audience for your webinar promotion. A safe bet is also Google Display Ads networks, which allows you to target specific groups of websites to narrow down your targeting.
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Run paid “Lead Generation” campaigns
Some sites, including Facebook and LinkedIn, allow to run ads that direct to a form instead of your website. Usually, these types of campaigns are called Lead Generation campaigns. As getting registrant information is one of the main objectives of running a webinar, these kinds of ads can be more interesting for your webinar promotion than say, ads linking to your registration page.
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Run paid advertising campaigns
If you’ve promoted events before, you’ll know that using paid is effective. It’s even more powerful when promoting webinars, as they’re typically delocalized, allowing registrants to participate from anywhere.
Messaging your existing user base and customers
If you’re a SaaS company, part or all of your customers would love to hear about your webinar. If you’re in the education industry, a government entity or NGO, chances are you also have an existing base of people to reach out to when promoting events. There are many platforms out there to manage your messages and targeting, so let’s focus on the “what” rather than the “how”.
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Add webinar promotion material in your transactional emails
If you’re looking at webinar promotion tactics, there’s no doubt your business relies on transactional emails for some parts. Those are the emails sent automatically by your app or a third party service to handle important tasks for your business such as billing and invoices, password resets, etc.
Tip from the Livestorm team:
As it’s always the case with messaging and emailing, making sure the content stays relevant and well-targeted should be your number one target.
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Send an in-app campaign to your users or visitors
We covered sending an outreach email newsletter, but messaging your existing base is important too depending on the type of webinar you want to promote. If you’re bulding an app, set up a message that will display for users relevant to your upcoming webinar.
Tip from the Livestorm team:
With apps such as Intercom or Drift, you can also message new visitors of your site even before having any information about them. Consider adding such a message a few days before the webinar.
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Motivate your support and/or sales teams to mention the webinars
Your support and sales teams are in perpetual contact with clients and leads. Sometimes, your webinar will be a great fit for more context and explanations on a certain topic a user asked about. Sometimes, it will help a potential buyer make a decision. So, getting your teams to mention it when the occasion arises can really help boost registrations.
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Change the support and contact auto-responders
We mentioned Intercom and similar apps to manage conversations with customers and prospects. Almost all of them allow you to add and customize an auto-responder message when someone initiates a chat conversation. Consider adding your webinar there if it provides value in this context.
Tip from the Livestorm team:
Adding an auto responder is a great idea for a product demo webinar for example.
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Send an invitation email
Email is a powerful tool to reach your audience. But the same advice applies than with the email outreach: you need to target your emails and tailor them specifically to the group you’ll send them too. You also want them to have an engaging copy and overall design. Think of using high-converting email titles like “save your spot”, without pushing it too far either!
Tip from the Livestorm team:
Use email variables to personalize your messaging according to each receiver. Segment them in groups beforehand for better targeting.
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Promote your webinars in the in-app onboarding process
This applies to demo webinars for SaaS businesses. If you often run demo sessions to onboard new customers, it may be a good idea to promote your webinars in the automated onboarding emails you send to new users upon registration.
Staying “top of mind” by messaging registrants
So, you’ve already done most of the webinar promotion work, and people registered to your webinar, yay! Or maybe you’re under your expectations? That’s OK too. Some companies find increasing value over time with their webinars, perhaps changing the topic or format a little would help in the future? Anyway, you’ve come this far, so give yourself a little pat on the back… but not for too long because you’re not done yet! Now, it’s time to focus on your registrants to make sure they actually attend your webinar when it’s live.
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Send reminders to registrants beforehand
Set your emailing service to automatically send a reminder, or several ones prior to the event.
Tip from the Livestorm team:
By default, Livestorm sends one reminder 1 hour before the event goes live.
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Enable an automatic reminder when the event goes live
Similarly to reminders before the event, make sure to remind all the registrants at the time the webinar is about to start.
Tip from the Livestorm team:
We advise on sending the reminder 5 minutes before going live.
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Send emails with articles and existing material related to the webinar’s topic
Ideally, you already have created content around your webinar’s topic, so you can piggyback on it and spread it over a series of emails to your registrants so they can start digging into it.
Tip from the Livestorm team:
Even if you haven’t created content about it, you can still use content from other sources and add context to it inside the email.
Continuously improve from past webinars
Promoting the webinar is nice, but what’s even nicer is gaining valuable insight with every webinar, that you’ll be able to use to continuously improve your strategy. This part focuses on the actions you can take to add tracking to your webinar’s pages, and ensure you know everything you need to know about your registrants and participants.
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Track visits on your webinar landing page
Add a tracking js snippet or tracking pixel on your webinar’s landing page to measure your campaigns effectiveness.
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Analyze email sends
After sending any email campaigns, you should have a look at the results. Get a sense of your open and click success rate, and try to correct email bounces and any other kinds of errors that may arise.
Tip from the Livestorm team:
Look for a webinar solution that lets you know about the status of all your sent emails (be it webinar launches or reminders).
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Analyze engagement on your past sessions
Open up the analytics on your past webinars to see the engagement rate of your participants throughout the webinar. Look for peak levels of engagement as well as low engagement ones. If some moments stand out, you should probably rethink your webinar’s content, its duration, or perhaps its pace.
Tip from the Livestorm team:
To learn about what your participants liked and disliked about your webinar, consider running a few polls at the end of each session.
Maximize value after the webinar is over
So far, we’ve focused on all the actions you can do to promote your webinar before it happens. But now that your webinar is over, there’s still quite a few actions you can take to push the webinar forward. You’ll either get more people to see your webinar’s replay, or get people interested in your upcoming sessions.
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Make the replay available to registrants
Among your registrants, some will not be able to attend the webinar live. Some will actually just register to be able to access the replay afterwards. So make sure to upload the replay and share it via email after the session is done.
Tip from the Livestorm team:
You should expect from 20% to 50% attendance rate (from registrant to participants) depending on your webinar’s topic, the software you use and the promotions you did beforehand. Livestorm customers register an average of 46% attendance rate.
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Use the replay to reach out to more people
After the webinar is done, the replay becomes your greatest asset. You can use it to promote future sessions, cut promotional videos from it… You can also use replays of your most successful sessions to pitch potential partners on future webinar series.
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Send a feedback survey
When hosting recurring webinars, it is import to reevaluate their content on a regular basis. Collecting feedback from actual webinar participants is a great place to start. You can do so either directly at the end of the webinar with a poll, or in one follow up email after the webinar is over.
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Reblogged this on PaperChain Blog.
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