In the past few years, webinars have become a very important source of knowledge sharing, handling customer queries, and generating new leads for your product or service.
The real challenge is getting people interested in your webinar and excited enough to visit your landing page, fill out the form, and actually show up. It is your job as the webinar host to make sure that your efforts generate leads for webinar attendees, send event reminders, and promote it to an existing contract record database is leak-proof.
This can be achieved with a great webinar topic, good promotion, and a combination of tools to optimize and streamline the process of lead generation and engagement. Here are four simple steps that will help you increase webinar registrations and attendance.
Step 1: Get the topic
Focus your webinar around a topic that is educational for your target audience, pick one that will help them solve a problem in their own organization. Finding out what trends are important for your customers can be challenging, I recommend checking out resources like Google Trends.
Google Trends could be a good place to start doing research for your topic. Here, we can use keywords to view past and present trend patterns. These patterns can be analyzed to help give you a better insight into what your customers are looking for and can help you write a topic that is right for you.
Step 2: Set Up the Webinar Landing Page
We need to make sure we are selling the event, not the product. One way to do this is by setting up a landing page within your CRM. Landing pages allow you to easily showcase the benefits that a person could expect from attending your webinar. The content on your landing page should be dedicated to convincing the reader why he or she should invest 30–40 minutes in your webinar.
One helpful method is using bullet points on your webinar landing page. This allows visitors to easily scan the key messaging about the webinar. Don’t forget to include a section that talks about the speakers and what they will be discussing.
They should be portrayed as experts on the topics covered in your webinar. Once a visitor has opted in, on the thank you page, it is a good idea to include a “add to calendar” link or button. This will allow them to automatically confirm the date and set a reminder to their calendar.
Step 3: Inviting registrations
Before we go out and start promoting the landing page that showcases our webinar, make sure to place your retargeting code on the page. This will allow you to track who has signed up and who has not, maybe even bringing them back at a better time to go through the signup process. Once this is set up, you should invite everyone in your CRM.
Consider an aggressive PPC campaign to drive more visitors to your landing page. Start by creating a campaign focused on specific keywords and search queries related to the webinar topic.
Social media is also an easy and effective way to increase attendance by leveraging existing assets. Schedule a series of tweets starting 2 weeks prior to the event. Make sure to vary the content and include images where possible, such as speaker photos.
One of the last, most important steps to oversubscribing your webinar is by entering into partnerships with other individuals or brands that can be beneficial by spreading the word and driving registration. You can do this by reaching out to the person in charge of marketing for prospective partners and asking them if they are interested in doing a joint webinar on an agreeable topic.
In the end, you both come away from the webinar with a list of prospects that you individually can follow up on.
Step 4: Ensure registrations show up
To ensure that more people turn up for your webinar, you have to get them excited and engaged before the webinar. You can do this by conducting a survey to find out what additional topics would interest your attendees.
In one of the first webinars that we conducted for Convrrt, we asked the attendees if they wanted to get their landing pages evaluated during the webinar. Many people expressed interest and shared the URLs of the landing pages that they wanted to evaluate. Needless to say, all the people who had shared their landing page URLs for us to evaluate turned up for the webinar.
As a best practice, start email promotions more than seven days prior to an event in order to maximize the size of your audience. Following the initial invitation, send a second reminder email a week later. Try sending last-minute reminders, in some cases in the form of a forwarded email directly from the assigned sales representative. Emails should include the contact’s first name and a personal note.
An example of this could be, “Jane, wanted to make sure that you saw the invitation to this great event we’re hosting in the next few minutes …”.
Remember, the key to increasing webinar attendance is to have a great topic, good promotion, and a combination of tools to optimize and streamline the process. We know that creating landing pages is no easy task, so we have taken the time to create one for your next webinar event so you don’t have to.
