The Pre-Event Playbook: The Art of Webinar Planning and Promotion

On today’s to do list: Create a planning and promotional strategy for webinars. Sounds easy enough for B2B marketers especially in the age of AI, right?

But developing a successful webinar plan is an art, not just a series of checklist items waiting to be crossed off. Developing a strong plan involves considering factors like personalization, emails, and timelines, plus shifting the focus away from the webinar itself, and towards marketing goals.

Not sure which category to start with first? Mark Bornstein, Vice President of Marketing at ON24, presented the secret ingredients, and key steps, for creating a robust webinar promotional strategy during the ON24 Experience 2024. Here’s what he had to say: 

Importance of Planning

Creating a planning and promotional strategy can be broken down into these three segments:

1. 1. Plan 
   2. Promote
   3. On-demand engagement

Step 1: Planning is more important to the webinar process than you think. In fact, when you are developing a webinar plan, you are actually identifying your end goal, the whole reason you decide to create a webinar in the first place. 

For example, what KPIs are you looking for? Is it a level of engagement, more appointments, or enrollment? Once you figure out your goal, you can start to determine what type of content is best and how you should be talking about it. Specific CTAs can help you reach your goal and may point users to sign up for a new demo, or attend additional on-demand webinars. 

Step 2: Deciding on promotional methods like emails, social, paid and/or organic effort are all part of your marketing strategy to help you reach your goal and yes, boost your attendance.

Step 3: Part of the planning stage is figuring out what to do after the webinar has concluded. Your webinar is not just one-and-done; you need to identify how you want to engage with your audience post-event. Sales and marketing follow-ups are especially crucial, says Bornstein.

Personalization and Segmentation

Even with AI enhancements and transformation, there’s so much more that can be done with personalization today. Bornstein reminds B2B marketers to always start with the age-old question: Who’s our audience? Once the audience is determined, B2B marketers can discuss how they want to speak to their audience members. Here’s some of the questions to ask:

• Should we be segmenting our audience?
• Can we speak to, or engage with, our audience in different ways?
• Even if we are speaking to a large group of people at a single event, are we promoting this single event to a large group of people?

Certain sectors or industries may require different webinar formats. Perhaps it makes more sense for a single guest speaker instead of a larger panel. Some webinars are more for state-of-the-industry updates, whereas others are more best practices. 

Regardless of your format, it should follow after you have identified your audience and their needs. Bornstein says, “Mapping program formats to audience needs, I think, is critical. And you can map them by funnel stage, you can map them by audience type.”

“Mapping program formats to audience needs, I think, is critical. And you can map them by funnel stage, you can map them by audience type.” — Mark Bornstein, VP Marketing, ON24

Detailed Planning and Timeline

Let’s talk timelines. Bornstein highlights the initial brief as the place where it all starts and shares insight into behind-the-scenes at ON24. A successful brief at ON24 will include all deliverables, ownership, dates, and objectives with “production milestones” for completion.

Establishing key milestones are important because B2B marketers are dealing with multiple moving parts. There are the creative aspects that include design and copy including abstracts, emails, and landing pages that often need to go through multiple reviews and rounds within different departments. Everyone from marketers, designers, and legal is often involved, which is why timelines are crucial.

Essentially, timelines help the process go smoother for everyone involved. Bornstein tells us, “by reducing the chaos, you reduce the stress.”

“By reducing the chaos, you reduce the stress.” — Mark Bornstein, VP Marketing, ON24

Promotional Strategy

Driving registration and attendance is key. After all that hard work from juggling multiple moving parts of your brief, you want to ensure that viewers show up — right? Actually, Bornstein says, getting people to attend is not the goal. The goal is the KPI you set right at the beginning of the planning and promotional journey.

For example, if your goal is engagement, and you get 2,000 people to sign up for your webinar, but no one is clicking through or touching your CTAs, then follow-up meetings with sales are not going to happen. Sure, you may have satisfied your attendance, but did you satisfy your main goal of engagement? 

That’s why having a strong promotional strategy in place to not only secure attendees, but to satisfy your end goal is important. 

Email Strategies

When it comes to catching your prospects at a moment of receptivity, having a strong subject line is critical. According to Bornstein, “The art and science of driving webinar registration is catching your prospects at a moment of receptivity.” 

The reality is that B2B marketers don’t know where their audience is going to be when they open and read that initial message. Therefore, subject lines are the first line of communication between you and a potential registrant.

Here’s how else you can make your email strategy effective:

• • Consider segmentation: If you’ve split your audience into different groups, create streams of unique emails for each of your segments.
  • Plan for on-the-fence (OTF) respondents: Some people will click on the “register now” button but only 50% will actually register. Send a specific email to those who haven’t fully completed the registration, and give them one last appeal for why they should attend.
  • Make it concise: Keep first liners of your email short and to the point. The most important thing you want your readers to know should be written in the first line of the email.
  • Include multiple links: Some people prefer to click out in the body copy, while others click links at the bottom of an email. Make sure there’s something for everybody.

Building a Strong Promotional Mix

Leveraging paid, shared, organic, and social channels are all part of a successful promotional campaign. Most audiences spend more time on social media than they do in their inboxes, so make sure you meet them where they’re at. Creating pre- or post-event blog posts is also a great way to direct them to the actual event. The goal is variety. And if that seems like a big task, there’s AI to help.

Use of AI in Content Creation

Long promotional cycles are the most effective marketing strategy; gone are the days where a two-week promotional period is good enough. According to the ON24 2024 Digital Engagement Benchmarks Report, For North America, 28% of all people that registered for a webinar registered 15 days or more in advance of that webinar. Bornstein says, “If you’re only promoting your webinar for two weeks, you’re missing a giant potential chunk of your audience.” 

Yes, a longer promotional cycle may mean a little more work, but it also means B2B marketers can reach their original goal. Fortunately, AI-powered Analytics and Content Engine (ACE) can help with the heavy content lift. ON24 Smart Text can help by suggesting subject lines, webinar titles, abstract copy, and promotional copy so you can start to scale your promotion more effectively.

“If you’re only promoting your webinar for two weeks, you’re missing a giant potential chunk of your audience.” — Mark Bornstein, VP Marketing, ON24

Post-Webinar Promotion

Post-webinar promotion is a key part of your planning and promotion strategy. Both On-demand webinars and building on-demand content hubs are ways you can continue to engage with your audience long after the live event, or simulive event, has concluded. And of course, AI can help create new content forms to continue to drive engagement.