After more than two years of video calls, you could be forgiven for thinking that people have had enough of online meetings and are now craving and embracing face-to-face contact.
But with statistics telling us that 54% of B2B professionals watch webinars every week (Findstack, The Ultimate List of Webinar Statistics for 2022), it seems online workshops will be sticking around for a while longer as part of the marketing communications mix.
We’ve all (just about) mastered the technology, remembered to take ourselves off mute, found the chat box, figured out how to get into the right breakout room, and realised the time-saving benefits of attending workshops in our lunch hour.
So, if webinars are going to form part of your B2B marketing activity, here are some of the best ways to promote them and achieve maximum value.
How to promote a webinar
Start with the people you already know – and encourage them to promote the webinar to their contacts, too. Create a professional, branded email using widely available email building software, which makes it easy for attendees to book their place and to share the email with relevant contacts.
Make sure that your email grabs attention and gives people compelling reasons to attend. One of the great things about these email marketing platforms is that you can see who has opened your email, how many people have clicked on the registration page, and how many have signed up for your event.
You will encourage greater attendance by sending more than one email invitation. Create a timetable leading up to the event - and stick to it. Most email marketing software packages make it easy to automate email resends to recipients who haven’t opened the original invitation after a given period of time, which helps maximise attendee numbers.
How to promote a webinar on social media
Put together a content plan to promote the webinar across whichever social channels you use. It’s easy for messages to get lost in the ether, so you’ll need to strike a balance between posting often enough to get the message across without overloading people and tuning them out. This balance will be different on different channels.
As well as sharing information about the event with your personal network and company page followers, LinkedIn can add further value when it comes to promoting - and even hosting - your event. There are a number of tools you can use including event-specific content and posts, InMail, LinkedIn Events, and sponsored posts, which are effective in targeting specific people by job title, location, sector etc.
If you’re running a lot of events, it’s worth setting up an Eventbrite page, too, and using your wider marketing channels to encourage people to follow so that they are alerted whenever a new event is posted.
Using key media to promote your webinar
A professionally written, targeted press release gives you another channel for announcing your webinar and giving your target audience insights into why they should attend. The story can feature on your website as a focal point for social media activity, as well as being sent to relevant trade and regional media. Make sure there’s a link to the registration page on your landing page to capture sign ups.
The release should highlight the benefit of attendance and outline the main themes – but don’t give away the entire content in your press release, or nobody will sign up to find out more!
Use external channels to drive webinar attendance
Another way of boosting attendance is to consider a solus email, working with an industry magazine with a readership that is relevant to your presentation content. The benefits of this are that the email is seen to come from a trusted source, and niche B2B media outlets often have high numbers of relevant and engaged readers.
Combine your webinar with an exhibition
If you’re ready to take your presentation into the real world, you could consider running it as a seminar at or alongside an industry exhibition. We’re seeing strong numbers at the industry trade shows we’ve visited so far this year, and often the people you are targeting will be at the exhibition already, so it’s an easy decision to sign up and come along.
If there are no seminar slots available at the exhibition, you could book a meeting room at the exhibition centre away from the exhibition stands, and then use the methods discussed to encourage attendance. Alternatively, work with the event organisers and put yourself forward as a speaker at one of their seminars or exhibition panel events.
It’s ain’t over till it’s over
You will undoubtedly have people sign up who don’t log in and watch on the day. Or people who dip out to take a call during the workshop. That’s why it’s important to follow up soon afterwards with a link to watch again/watch online. This is also a perfect opportunity to direct your audience to your next piece of content – the next webinar in the series, or to more information on the topic you’ve covered.
Everything is content
So, you’ve delivered your event. Tick it off the list and move on to the next activity on your marketing plan, right? Wrong.
In preparing your presentation you have created a content goldmine, so make sure you get the most out of it. Often you or the presenter will have written a script for their presentation. With a bit of tweaking, this will make a great keyword-rich blog post and/or article for your next company newsletter.
You’ll no doubt have a few soundbites or key takeaways from the presentation, too. These can be packaged up into social posts, like these, and shared across social channels after the event to help drive traffic back to watch the webinar – in exchange for their email address, if that’s how you’ve set it up.
There are many ways to get online events working hard for your business and budget, and we’d be happy to chat if you’re planning a webinar, seminar, or workshop to help you make sure you get the most out of it.
Our team has spent the last three decades helping manufacturing and engineering businesses generate results from great communications, so if you’re looking to make an impact with your target audience the chances are we can help.
To find out more about how our PR, social media and digital marketing support can help you grow your business, give Partners director Karen Tinkler a call on 01904 610077.