3 Rules to Follow For More Successful Webinar Marketing

Webinars have long held a reputation as marketing powerhouses, and for very good reasons:

• Attendance and engagement at these virtual events continues to climb each year.
• They create highly valuable content that’s easy to repurpose.
• If you pick your topics well they can remain a source of solid leads for months or even years after they’re released.

Unfortunately you can’t just record a webinar, put it on the internet, and wait for the leads to roll in.

You’ve got to put in the legwork before the webinar happens to ensure its success, and that’s what we’re going to focus on in this article: the three crucial pieces of successful webinar marketing.

These are the can’t-miss items you need to address if you want your webinar to become the lead generating machine that it could be.

Step 1: Webinar Title and Description

No matter what kind of audience you’re targeting with your webinars, chances are they’re getting bombarded by marketing messages throughout their day. You need to ensure that your webinar’s information can get through the clutter and entice a registration.

This may seem like a daunting hurdle, but the formulas for writing compelling webinar titles and descriptions aren’t very complicated.

The Anatomy of a Great Webinar Title

You can’t go wrong with a general-to-specific flow in your title. Basically you start off with a high-level description of a common business problem that your audience faces, then you move into a more detailed example.

In their detailed report, Crafting Titles and Abstracts that Drive Webinar Registrations, the video and webinar provider BrightTalk reported that 4 out of 5 of their most successful webinars in 2015 followed this format.

Their advice:

The more strategic your title is the better chance you have of enticing qualified attendees to register for your content…Your audience should be able to scan to see if the subject matter will help them solve their business problems. Inserting industry keywords will help grab the attention of your target audience and improve SEO.

If that technique doesn’t quite fit your topic, you can try any one of these six other ideas:

1. Reference to current events: Ex: Planning for Pipeline: Top Trends Driving 2016 B2B Marketing Investments
2. Solve a problem: Ex: Improve Leading Scoring Efficiency with Webinar Engagement Data
3. Question: Ex: Are We Driving Revenue or Driving Customers?
4. Inclusion of numbers/statistics: Ex: 50+ Content Marketing Hacks that Will Double Your Engagement & Conversion Rates
5. Bold Statement: Ex: Everything You Need to Know About Webinar Promotions to Maximize Attendance
6. Humor: Ex: How to Run 85 Webinars a Year Without Losing Your Mind

Bullet Points: The Magic Bullet of Webinar Descriptions

Although you don’t want to overuse bulleted lists in your webinar itself, they are extremely useful in outlining the main takeaways from your webinar.

Remember, the goal of a webinar description is to convince your audience that your content is worth an hour of their time. You’ve got to be clear and compelling in a very small space.

You’ll want to lead off with a general problem that your audience faces, and then use a bulleted list to give them the amazing things you’ll be revealing in your webinar to help solve that problem.

This can take several forms:

• A nice, simple list of what your audience will learn.
• An outline of market trends or shifts, including where the market is headed and data-supported predictions of future changes.
• A teaser of what they’re doing wrong (and how you can help fix the problem).
• Proof statistics, which can range from customer case studies to revenue generated to percent growth to support your presentation’s objectives.

Finally, if you’re using a guest speaker in the webinar make sure to include a 1-2 sentence biography at the end. This should position them as a can’t-miss thought leader in your industry, so focus on the highlights instead of a comprehensive recap of their accomplishments.

Step 2: Highly Optimized Webinar Landing Page(s)

There’s nothing worse than having beautifully written copy that drives tons of traffic to a landing page that can’t generate conversions, but this is a common downfall of webinar marketing.

As a refresher on general conversion rate optimization, let’s turn to the experts over at Unbounce. They outline these five key components to a high-converting webinar landing page:

1. Unique Selling Proposition: Your actionable webinar title
2. Hero Shot: Your expert guest and bio
3. Benefits: What will people learn from the webinar
4. Social Proof: Testimonials about the guest or your previous webinars
5. Call-to-Action: Your registration form and button

Although somewhat basic, this is a piece of your webinar marketing that you absolutely cannot neglect. A/B test your page wherever possible so you know you’re using language that appeals to your unique audience.

Landing Page Pro Tip: I love the idea that Unbounce proposes to make your webinar landing page work even harder. Once you’ve got a signup for a webinar, encourage them to also sign up for your emails using an exit popup:

SCREENSHOT

Step 3: Clever and Consistent Emails About Your Webinar

Only about half of your webinar signups will make it to the webinar itself; the last piece of effective webinar marketing is to get this number up as high as possible.

Fortunately after you’ve done the work of crafting an awesome webinar title and description you’ll have nearly all of your email text done.

Use the title in the email subject line (shortening as needed), and transfer your description to the body of the email. If you have any testimonial quotes from previous webinars, this is another great place to reuse them.

Encouraging people to sign up even if they aren’t sure they can make it is actually another great tactic. It may hurt your attendance numbers, but it will still get you leads that you can market to over time.

Once you get a successful signup, you need to keep your webinar on your potential attendee’s radar. You’ll want to send your registrants at least five emails about the webinar:

1. A confirmation of a successful registration. This should provide technical details about getting to the webinar and a reminder of the date and topic.
2. Two week reminder. Include something of value that’s related to your webinar topic, like an ebook or blog post series, so that you’re continuing the conversation instead of bombarding attendees.
3. One week reminder. This goes out a week ahead of your webinar and gives people a gentle nudge to keep space clear on their calendar. Again, try to include something of value in your email.
4. One day reminder. The day before the webinar you should reach out to your confirmed attendees to make sure they are ready and excited for the event. You can also send a “Last Chance” message to people on your email list who haven’t opened any of your other invites. This time sensitivity can be a powerful motivator.
5. Download information. After the webinar’s over, let people know where they can download the recording. This will grab those who are still interested in your topic but couldn’t make it to the webinar in real time. The downloadable file will also serve as long-term lead generation for those who didn’t register for the webinar initially.

Bonus Step: Creating the Right Foundation for Your Webinar

All the clever copy and magical marketing techniques won’t do you much good if you don’t have a great webinar event to promote.

To give yourself the best chance of webinar marketing success, spend a little bit of extra time making sure that you have:

• An interesting topic. This should be tactical and actionable for your audience. Solve a specific problem with each and every webinar, and you’ll be on the right track.
• Solid speakers. While guest speakers are a great way to expand the network of people who hear about your webinars, great speakers can come from in house too.
• The right schedule. Mondays and Fridays are generally not good webinar days. Aim for Wednesday or Thursday in the middle of the day to catch the most possible attendees.
• No technical difficulties. Test your software, microphone, video camera, and whatever other tools you need to give attendees a seamless, glitch-free experience.

How Do You Create Webinar Success?

Any tips or tricks up your sleeve that you want to share with the group? Let us know in the comments!