Your Webinar Marketing Strategy Guide

A webinar is any online event where a speaker, or group of speakers, deliver a presentation to a receptive audience. Aside from delivering important information about a company and its offerings, webinars are a one-to-many marketing tactic that marketers can use to promote, explain and contextualize brand messaging and products.

A good webinar is engaging and interactive for attendees. Done well, webinars can accelerate purchasing decisions with interested prospects and nurture attendees as necessary. Webinars also provide in-depth analytics into who attended, how they engaged with the webinar’s content, and what they want from future events – so they are a data goldmine for marketing teams in search of real-world, real-time insights.

Planning ahead and making the most of all the marketing channels available to you will increase your chances of pulling off a winning webinar. 

Here are the steps you need to follow: 

Setting promotion and marketing goals

Set specific, measurable goals for your webinar promotion, so you can keep track of your success. Here are some ideas to get you started:

Registration numbers

Set a target for how many people you want to register. For example: “Increase webinar registrations by 25% compared to the last event, aiming for 500 registrants.”

Attendance rate

Focus on the percentage of registrants who actually attend. A common goal could be: “Achieve a 60% attendance rate from 500 registrations, equaling 300 attendees.”

Engagement metrics

Measure how attendees interact, such as chat participation, Q&A submissions, or poll responses. A specific engagement goal might be: “50% of attendees should respond to at least one poll or submit a question during the session.”

Lead generation

Set goals related to converting attendees into leads. For instance: “Generate 100 qualified leads from webinar attendees by the end of the month.”

Post-webinar actions

Track follow-up actions, such as how many attendees download a resource or sign up for a demo. You could go with: “Convert 10% of attendees to demo requests within one week.”

Identifying your target audience

Knowing who your audience is will help you customize and optimize every webinar experience for better results, not to mention market the event in a smarter and more efficient way. 

When defining your audience, keep the following in mind: 

Persona development

One message does not fit every audience. A practitioner might be looking for more tactical content they can apply right away as opposed to an executive who might prefer a high-level discussion with an exclusive group of peers. 

Unique audience segments

Every target prospect list has different types of businesses, verticals and unique use cases. Experiences unique to one may not be relevant for another. Keep your audience in mind when building, promoting and following up on your webinars to ensure you are serving up only what is most relevant to them. We’ll share more on how to identify and utilize audience segments later on. 

Stages of the buying journey

Make sure your webinar is designed to meet your prospects precisely where they are at. A top-of-funnel audience may be more interested in a thought-leadership webinar whereas someone on the verge of a purchase decision may benefit from a more product-focused experience.

When you’re taking a webinar to market, it’s got to be all hands on deck. And that means including your sales team in promotional efforts.

While your sales team will have a natural understanding of which prospect may be interested in an upcoming webinar, they’ll need to be prepared with the right material at the right time. This is where having promotional packages — including images for social media, landing pages, ad banners and relevant copy — comes in handy. Prep these items and share them with sales well before your event.

Sometimes, however, sales teams need some encouragement to drive registrations. Consider using a portion of your marketing budget towards sales bonuses for driving webinar registrations. That way, they will have even more of a reason to reach out and work closely with the marketing team. 

Integrating the sales department into your webinar programs is the best way to accelerate sales cycles and keep hot leads from turning cold. SQLs have a short shelf life, so keeping track of their intent signals and relaying that information to sales teams (and fast) is mission critical.

Sharing information and updates via social media

You’ll want to promote your event on your owned social media channels with a series of carefully timed posts.

Text-based reminders will only get you so far. You need to produce a range of content in various formats to capture the attention of your prospects.

For example, preview videos summarizing what your webinar will be about is an excellent way to get people excited about what you’re about to offer, and give them insights into what they can expect from the session. Behind-the-scenes footage and speaker interviews can be used to introduce the people your audience will soon meet online, and question-focused social media snippets are great for starting conversations and getting attendees to interact with each other ahead of time. 

Investing in paid social promotions

When time is of the essence, it may be necessary to pay for registrations. Often, that means creating targeted posts that can be shared via various social media platforms. 

First, identify the key forums where you know where your customers like to hang out. Are they a LinkedIn or Instagram crowd? What about technical forums like Spiceworks – do these communities hold any value?

Take a look at your organic social media posts — particularly those promoting events — and identify those that have performed well and use similar language to promote your webinar. If you have in-depth knowledge of the persona you want to engage, then take advantage of platform tools that allow you to target ads to specific audiences.

Paid campaigns cost you money, so you should do everything you can to make it easy for a would-be registrant to say “yes,” to your event. For example, if you promote your webinar on LinkedIn, consider taking advantage of lead gen forms so when a user clicks the call to action on an ad or sponsored post, the form they need to register for the webinar has already been filled with information from their LinkedIn profile.

Reaching further across the web with display networks

For access to the biggest audience the web can offer, turn to ad networks. For example, the Google Display Network reaches more than 90% of people on the internet. Any display network you work with should allow you to serve relevant ads to prospects while they’re browsing websites or generally browsing the internet. For example, YouTube can be a very useful promotional source for your webinar.

Display networks also empower you to target existing customers or find new ones by placing ads on sites that you have chosen and that are relevant to the customer (an industry forum or news source, for example). It also lets you retarget customers who might have expressed an interest in the webinar by visiting its landing page, but not signing up.

There are several ways you can grab the attention of your target audience and get them to register for your webinar:

Use urgency or time sensitivity to drive action

Creating a sense of urgency encourages immediate action. You could go with a subject line like: “Last Chance: Register for Tomorrow’s Expert Webinar!”

 Highlight the value of what you’re organizing

Emphasize the key benefit or problem your webinar will solve. Try something like: “Learn How to Boost Your Sales by 30% – Free Webinar!’. Then, outline the key takeaways in the first few sentences so the core proposition doesn’t get missed. For example: “In just one hour, discover proven strategies to increase your sales using data-driven techniques.”

Personalize your communications 

Use the recipient’s name and personalize the message to make it relevant to their interests. How about: “John, Don’t Miss This Insider Guide to [Industry] Trends!”

Use numbers or statistics

Including numbers makes your message specific and impactful. “5 Game-Changing Tips to Enhance Your Team’s Productivity” gives readers a better idea of what to expect from your webinar content. 

Ask a question

Curiosity-based subject lines encourage opens and clicks. Your subject line could read: “Struggling to Increase Conversions? We’ve Got Solutions!”

Use social proof

Showcase the number of registrants you’ve gathered for the event. Try something like: “Join 500+ Attendees for a Must-Attend Webinar”. You could also Include testimonials or stats from previous webinars: “In our last webinar, 95% of attendees left with actionable insights – don’t miss out!”

Timing your webinar email campaigns

Discuss the optimal timing for sending promotional emails, including initial announcements, reminders, and follow-ups.

To promote webinars using emails, it’s best to prepare three emails to go out to your database at least two weeks in advance. Your first email, a webinar announcement, should be sent at the beginning of that two-week period. Your second follow-up, which should act as a gentle reminder, should be sent out the next week. Your final email should be actioned on the day of the event to encourage hesitant registrants to commit. 

You’ll also need to do some research into which times of day tend to drive the best open rates. There’s a general consensus that around 10am on a mid-week workday is optimal, because this is when professionals are online and checking their inboxes – but results will vary depending on who you’re mailing, what their schedule typically looks like, and external factors like seasonal holidays and current events

Segmenting your email list

Segmenting an email list allows you to tailor your promotional messaging to different audience groups, which keeps the content relevant and appealing to each type of prospect. 

If you’re stuck on how to segment, you could begin by splitting your audience:

 By demographics

Segment your list based on demographics like age, gender, or location. For instance, if your webinar targets a specific region or country, send tailored emails to that demographic. 

By industry or job role

This is crucial if your webinar addresses industry-specific challenges or insights. Segmenting by job title (eg, marketing managers or sales directors) ensures that the content resonates with the recipient’s role. 

By behavior

Leverage previous interactions to segment your list based on behaviors like past webinar attendance, resource downloads, or engagement with your emails. If someone attended a past webinar on a similar topic, they’re more likely to register again, so you can send them a personalized email with information on something else they’ll love. 

By stage in the buyer’s journey

Segment your list based on where your leads are in the sales funnel. If a segment is new to your brand, focus on educational content to introduce them to your product or service. For leads closer to conversion, focus on advanced topics and how your solutions can help them. 

By interests

Focus on the specific topics or services certain prospects have shown an interest in. If your webinar focuses on SEO, send the invite to those who’ve downloaded SEO-related resources or shown interest in digital marketing.

Here’s an easy-to-follow summary of all the advice we’ve shared in this article to help you develop a killer webinar marketing strategy from scratch.

• • Set your goals early on – know which data you want to track, and why
  • Identify your target audience – and segment them if you can
  • Get your sales team on board for a unified approach
  • Prepare multi-format promotional content for use across social media
  • Explore paid advertising strategies to raise awareness of your event, including pay per click campaigns and display network campaigns
  • Consider the order, timing and content of your marketing emails for maximum reach and conversions
  • Segment your email list for a more targeted approach to digital comms
  • Optimize your webinar’s landing page so it appears in organic search for keywords that are relevant to your webinar
  • Find ways to link back to this registration page, internally and externally