Speaker 1: Webinars are powerful. For a start, a case study by Shauna Lynn Simon shows that she generated $2,200 return on investment from a single one-hour webinar. The message is clear. If you're looking to sell more, you need to start using webinars to grow your business. Hi, my name is Karen and in this video I'll show you the best webinar promotion strategies. Here's what we'll cover in this video. The best times to promote your webinar, ways to improve your webinar landing page, how to partner with a brand or influencer to promote your webinar, tips for writing attention-grabbing webinar invitations, and much more. Let's dive in. The trick to marketing a webinar is to treat it just like a new product or service launch. The following best practices will help you promote your webinar like a pro. 1. Get your promotion timing right. Studies have shown that you can get higher conversion rates on specific days and times as compared to others. For instance, the webinar platform On24 analyzed thousands of webinars to shape its 2020 webinar benchmark report. It revealed that more than 50% of registrants signed up at least eight days before the webinar. This goes on to show how important it is to start promoting your webinar much sooner than the date of the webinar. In fact, recommend that you start at least a month in advance. On that note, here are some timing guidelines to schedule your webinar promotions. Monday 17%, Tuesday 22%, Wednesday 21%, Thursday 22%, Friday 13%, and Saturday and Sunday at 5%. Tuesdays are known to trigger the most registrations, which can be as high as 24% of total signups, so make sure to initiate key promotions every Tuesday. Mornings, especially the time between 8 and 10 a.m., are known for a spike in registrations, so based on the time zone of your prospects, schedule your promotions in the early part of the day. 2. Get your promotion timing right. Your registration page can make or break your signup rate, so make sure it's optimized to convey the full value of attending your webinar. Tweak it to include persuasive content and graphics, benefit-oriented headlines, authority badges, social proof, and customer reviews. Take Mastin Kipp's webinar page for example. This page gets a lot of things just right. You can see that the headline communicates a clear benefit, multiple CTAs are working together in sync, there are no outbound links to distract the visitor, it focuses only on getting the visitor to sign up for the webinar. Want to boost your registration rate even further? Here are two more steps you can take to make your webinar page the best it can be. Reduce form fills. The easier it is to fill the form, the more people will sign up for your webinar. Only ask for what's essential. Include a video. Videos have a positive impact on conversion rates. You can easily create short branded video clips with PictoStory along with automated subtitles and other customization features. 3. Partner with an influencer. Brands are increasingly investing in influencer marketing and building relationships with social media superstars. In fact, influencer marketing worldwide is estimated to grow to $22.3 billion by 2024. So don't miss this opportunity when marketing your webinar. Collaborating with an industry influencer can give your webinar extra credibility and exposure. Here's how to do it. Find the top influencers in your industry. You can do this with tools such as Ninja Outreach and GirlPie. Link is in the description box below for a copy of the script. When partnering with an influencer, also make sure to make it easy for them to promote your webinar. Give them ready to publish social media posts, videos, and other materials that they can literally just copy and paste. 4. Involve employees in webinar marketing. When it comes to promoting a webinar on social media, your employees can be your greatest assets. According to the MSL group, your staff members are connected to 10 more people than your brand. The study also showed that brand messages reach 561% further when shared by workers versus when shared via official brand social media accounts. Brand messages are re-shared 24 times more frequently when posted by employees versus the brand. The potential to promote your webinar by involving your employees is huge, so whatever social media posts you plan to share on your company's channel, encourage employees to promote the same in parallel. To do this, you can launch an employee advocacy program and educate employees about it through a company-wide newsletter. Explain how it works, what's in it for them, and how it will help advance the company. Then, as with influencers and partners, make it easy for them to participate and contribute to your company's webinar promotion efforts. You can use a centralized platform to keep all the marketing collateral in one place. This way, your employees will be able to access and share materials easily and with their networks. 5. Send custom personalized invites offline. According to Statista, 90% of US adults find personalized marketing content very or somewhat appealing. However, you can't write personalized messages or schedule one-to-one meetings with every prospect. It's just not scalable, but there's no reason to overlook your most important prospects. These are people who are closest to making a purchase or those who have bought from you before, and your sales team can easily identify such prospects. So, work with the team members to write personalized webinar invites for key accounts. For example, here are some bonus tips to keep in mind to write a great webinar invite. Generate a catchy subject line. Your subject line determines if the prospect will open your message. If you understand the pain points of your prospects, you'll know how to grab your attention from the get-go. Be brief and concise. Don't overload your prospects with webinar content. The invitation is supposed to be a short teaser that creates intrigue for the full webinar. Craft an irresistible call-to-action. Call attention to what you want the reader to do. Tell them exactly what to do and why, and make it as easy as possible to take action, that is, signing up for the webinar. 6. Offer a free incentive. Give your audience another reason to register for the webinar. A well-thought lead magnet. It's a bonus gift people can chew on as they wait for the webinar. A lead magnet warms the prospect before the webinar and also builds excitement for the event. For example, when a prospect signs up for the webinar, you can give instant access to webinar presentation, handout, PDF report, training video, or an e-book. Whatever the incentive, it should be something that provides instant gratification. Keep it short and specific. Creating an attractive lead magnet is easy. You can use PictoChart to create reports, ebooks, and presentations, while PictoStory can be used to record and edit videos. For example, to create a report, just log into your PictoChart dashboard and select reports from the left sidebar menu. To learn more, see our guide to report design. 7. Harness your email list. As compared to the 18% average open rate of a standard email, webinar emails have the potential to reach open rates as high as 72%. So, it's evident that email marketing can have a huge impact on your webinar's attendance and overall success. Here's what you need to do. Create an email series for your webinar and set it on autopilot for the people in your email list. The email sequence will include... If you've never set up an email automation before, it's not that complicated. Modern email marketing platforms give you the ability to easily configure an email series. However, don't stop sending emails to your webinar prospects and attendees once the email series has run out. Add them in another automated email campaign that keeps nurturing them towards your brand. 8. Advertise on your web properties. Do you have a website or other online property with a good amount of traffic? If the answer is yes, you shouldn't miss this opportunity. Identify the pages which get the most number of visitors and display an ad for your webinar. Here's how IBM is doing theirs. Here are some ideas that will come in handy. Stick your banner advert to the resources and events area of your website. If you don't have an events page, it's a good idea to create one. Feature the banner ad above the fold on your homepage and on your blog's main page. When someone subscribes to your newsletter or purchases a product, display your banner ad on the thank you and confirmation pages. Write blog posts on topics related to your webinar. Then include a call to action near the blog post for people to sign up for your webinar. 9. Turn to your social media channels. As of 2020, over 3.6 billion people have been using social media worldwide and this number is projected to increase to almost 4.41 billion in 2025. Needless to say, social media can go a long way in marketing your webinar. To get started, pick the social media platforms where your target prospects are most likely to hang out. Then develop a series of social media posts that inform and encourage prospects to register for your webinar. Then develop a series of social media posts that inform and encourage prospects to register for your webinar. Here's an example. And while you're at it, make sure to adapt the content and graphics for each social media platform such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Use tools such as PictoChart and PictoStory to create engaging social media graphics and videos. You can also use social automation software like Social Pilot and Meet Edgar to schedule your posts in advance. If your webinar has guest speakers, include their photos and bios in your marketing materials and make sure to tag them in your social media updates. Finally, don't overlook the power of hashtags. Using the right hashtags can help you get your webinar promotion in front of non-followers. There are several tools that can help with hashtag research. 10. Participate in communities and groups. The web is filled with discussion forums, questions, and answers, and other types of communities related to your niche. And these can be the perfect avenue to spread the word about your webinar. Examples include public Slack workspaces, Facebook groups, Discord communities, Reddit forums, and Quora spaces. For example, to start promoting your webinar in Facebook groups, head over to Facebook and search for the groups in your niche. From there, you can request to join the groups with a large and active membership. Once you're in the group, start contributing to conversations and mention your webinar when it's relevant. But don't go overboard because that's the kind of thing that will get you labeled as a spammer and banned from the group. Focus on generally adding value to the ongoing conversations first. In fact, you can increase engagement even more by involving members in shaping your webinar. For example, 11. Team up with other businesses. Partnerships can drive more than 20% of your business revenue. When promoting a webinar, you can double your reach by cross-promoting with other businesses. It's a local strategy that will not only boost your webinar, but also lend additional social proof to your brand. You can partner with any business with a good reputation and the same target audience as yours, as long as it's not a direct competitor. For example, here's an illustration of how PictoChart and Demio teamed up to promote a webinar. To benefit from the same approach, find brands in your niche who can benefit from a marketing collaboration with you. Then reach out to them to pitch your idea. For example, if all goes well, you can plan a joint webinar along with defining the marketing activities to be carried out by each partner. For example, if one brand has a large audience they can bring to the table, the other can offer to create their marketing materials and provide a giveaway to promote the webinar. 12. Involve speakers in webinar promotion. You need every advantage you can get to drive webinar signups and one such advantage is the speakers involved. Different presenters come with unique promotional competence. Some will go the extra mile to ensure a successful webinar, while others may be too shy to sell themselves. Regardless, you will surely get a better outcome by making promotion easy for them. Once the webinar schedule has been finalized, provide speakers with all the details and marketing collateral they might need to invite their audience and contacts. The materials will include the hashtags relevant to your webinar, the complete agenda and date and time of the webinar, links to landing pages, flyers and social media graphics, videos from past webinars, hint, edit them with PictoStory. Convincing the speakers to contribute to your webinar's promotion shouldn't take much work. The more people show up in the webinar, the better it is for the speakers too. 13. Create bite-sized video clips. This tactic doesn't directly promote your webinar, but it fuels every other marketing nugget I have covered in this video. Think of short video clips as your Swiss army knife for webinar promotion. Whether you're promoting your webinar in your email newsletter, website, social media or other platforms, your campaign will go much further and get more engagement with video than plain text. 85.7% of marketers agree that video is now more important for brand than other forms of content. With a tool like PictoStory, you don't even need complex video editing software or professional video production team. You can easily repurpose videos from previous webinars, Zoom meetings or just record yourself through your webcam. Not just that, once you upload a video, the subtitles will be generated automatically. From there, you can customize your video and captions as you see fit. To modify or delete any part of the text or video, just select the part. Then you can edit the text or press the remove button to cut the part. The editing process is as easy as editing a text document. Within minutes, you will have short clips ready to download or share on social media and other marketing channels. So there you go. In this video, we have tried to cover every practical and actionable way under the sun to help with webinar promotion. If you properly implement each of these tactics, you will be well on your way to conducting a kick-ass webinar and driving your business forward. No matter what webinar promotion strategies you pick, just make sure to keep your target audience in mind and be careful of whom you partner with. Hosting a successful webinar takes lots of resources but if done right, the benefits are huge and your efforts will not go in vain. Finally, don't forget the potential of short, bite-sized clips when it comes to webinar marketing. If you're ready to promote your webinar with engaging videos, create a free PictoStory account. Link in the description box below. If you found the tips shared in this video valuable, make sure to hit the like button and subscribe to PictoStory's YouTube channel. Good luck with your webinar and until next time. you