5 Ways to Drive Webinar Registrations At Speed
This post is the latest in our series on scrappy marketing – an approach can help you achieve better results in less time.
With so much competition for your audience’s attention, driving webinar registrations is becoming even more challenging. How do you convince people to spend an hour of their working day with you? You’re going to need a compelling proposition, as well as a kick-ass promotion strategy.
Let’s say you have a great webinar idea that’s super topical, so you need to get it out there, fast. You know that generally, the longer the promotion cycle, the better, but what if you don’t have time? In this blog, we look at five scrappy ways to drive webinar sign-ups, and at speed.
Use email marketing to drive sign-ups ahead of time
Still one of the biggest drivers of webinar registrations, it’s important to get email marketing right. But how do you accelerate the process while retaining effectiveness?
As detailed in our guide on webinar promotions, it’s usually best to at least three emails in a webinar promo cycle – the first least two weeks before the webinar, another one week before and a final one on the day (or on the day before). With a shorter window for promotion, however, you’re going to have to keep things interesting so that your audience doesn’t fatigue.
Pull out different angles of interest for each email that follows the first, perhaps personalizing the messaging and creative to different segments of the email list. Alternatively, emphasize the appearance of one of your panel members, according to who the segment would be most interested in.
Engage in Partner Marketing to Increase Your Reach
Striking up a strategic partnership with a business with similar customers to yours – but that crucially, does not have a competing offering – can significantly extend your reach.
With more brains behind the campaign and a wider audience to target, you’ll make a greater impact. You can also take advantage of each other’s strengths – for example, if they’re great at content, have them take the reins on creating assets for the campaign, while you get busy with SEO, if that’s your thing.
As a case in point, this scrappy marketing series is a partnership between NetLine and ON24 – so you’re reading an example of this in action!
Use Your Sales Team – and Incentivize Them
When you have a webinar to promote, and at speed, it’s got to be all hands on deck. This is where the assets you create to promote the campaign really come into their own. Share them with your sales team, along with some email messaging that they can send to their prospects. Sales will have a nose for who will be most interested in the webinar, so get them involved as soon as possible.
Also consider using your marketing budget towards sales bonuses for driving registrations. That way they will have even more of a reason to reach out.
Promote via Paid Social
When time is of the essence, it may be necessary to take the paid route. First up, you need to know where your customers like to hang out. Are they more of a LinkedIn, or a Twitter crowd?
Consider sponsoring organic posts on LinkedIn so that they will be shown to a wider audience. Choose those that have already been performing well to give them an extra push. The platform also lets you target ads to specific audiences based on demographic information, job type, or what skills they’ve declared. These ads will appear in the sidebar when the user logs into LinkedIn.
Driving webinar registrations on the double requires creating a sense of urgency. In your creative, use images that include people (bonus if their gaze appears to be in the direction of the call to action), as well as the name of the webinar, the date and the time it will take place.
If you do decide to promote your webinar on LinkedIn, consider taking advantage of lead gen forms, so that when a user clicks the call to action on an ad or sponsored post, the form they need to fill to register for the webinar has already been filled with information from their LinkedIn profile – easier for the user, and more accurate information for you.
Facebook also offers lead ads, and also lets marketers build custom audiences, so that you can target ads to prospects who, say, may have attended past webinars, or have visited a few pages on your website about the webinar topic.
Use Display Networks to Reach Prospects Across the Web
For access to the widest audience the web can offer, turn to ad networks. Google Display Network as an example, which reaches more than 90% of people on the internet, lets advertisers serve relevant ads to prospects while they’re browsing websites, checking their Gmail or – which could be very useful while promoting a webinar – when they’re watching a video on YouTube.
The network also lets you target existing customers or find new ones by placing ads on sites that you have chosen, and that are relevant to the customer. It also lets you retarget customers who might have expressed an interest in the webinar, for example, by visiting its landing page but not signing up.
