13 Proven Ways to Promote Your Webinar to Boost Sign-ups

May 1, 2023
By Erkki Muuga

13 Proven Ways to Promote a Webinar and Skyrocket Sign-ups

Webinar as a marketing tool has become quite popular and more and more marketers are taking advantage of their popularity. So much so, over 60% of marketers include webinars in their marketing plans.

You’re in the right place if you’re wondering if the webinar marketing strategy is the right path for your business. In this article, we’re going to explore 13 proven webinar promotion tips to increase sign-ups and boost the attendance rate.

The Best Webinar Promotion Tips

1. Brainstorm an Attractive Webinar Topic

You might be thinking: Isn’t this advice plain as day? Is it worth mentioning here? It is.

I once attended a webinar on Applied Mathematics where the speaker spent the better part of the session on the history of equations. Needless to say, the participants didn’t benefit much from the webinar.

Choose a topic that’s not only relevant but also practical. The knowledge the participants gain from the webinar must be easy to implement.

If you’re still undecided on the topics to develop the webinars, look at your competition and also others in the same field. Gain insights on topics that are working for them.

Don’t mimic others, but learn from them. Come up with a unique topic, bring out new perspectives on old themes, or add enough actionable points to stand out and attract more subscribers.

There is always a way to introduce a unique angle to a topic.

2. Create a Clear Webinar Landing Page

The webinar landing page is where the visitor signs up for your webinar. This is arguably the most important part of your webinar promotion. This is where you’ll be directing all your traffic and where the visitors convert to sign-ups.

The most important factors about a webinar’s landing page to increase the sign-up form conversions are:

A webinar registration page with these attributes usually has a lot higher conversion rates. The good thing is that with the best webinar platforms, you can easily build attractive landing pages that follow all these best practices.

A lot of these webinar platforms allow adding your own custom fields to the registration form. It’s a great feature if you want to capture more data about your webinar attendees, so you can prepare better. It’s also great for lead generation.

After customizing your webinar landing page, you’ll get a unique registration link, which you can use in all your channels for webinar promotion.

3. Include a Countdown Timer to Create Urgency

Don’t be surprised; countdown timers work.

According to a case study, the inclusion of a countdown timer in emails improved the CTR by 121% and the conversion rate by 400%.

Countdown timers work because they create a sense of urgency. In the minds of the visitors, the timer creates a feeling that they are running out of time to join something important. The feeling they have less time than they thought drives the visitors to take action without hesitation.

Place the countdown timer at a strategic location on your landing page, most probably somewhere near the sign-up form, to boost webinar signups and maximize attendance.

Another effective feature is to include exit intent pop-ups on your landing pages. Just as a visitor is about to leave, they are presented with an offer to sign up. Offer something extra enticing, but don’t annoy your visitors.

4. Create Video Content to Boost Sign-ups

Text content isn’t the only option to promote your webinars. You could use videos too to disseminate the news about the event.

Videos would be a better option because people are more likely to watch them than read a blog post or text notice.

Create a short teaser video (not more than 90 seconds long) that talks about the event. If your webinar is to include multiple speakers, give each one a chance to explain their role in the event.

You could include that video right on the registration page, to encourage your website visitors to sign up.

Alternatively, you could even use a testimonial video of your previous event to promote upcoming webinars.

How does this work? Rope in participants of previous events to talk about their experience and the benefits they gained from the webinars.

5. Promote on Webinar Listing Websites

Businesses often miss this effective webinar promotion strategy – You can drive more sign-ups and attendance to webinars by using listings for webinar promotions.

We’re talking about webinar listing platforms that act as a bridge between people wanting to impart knowledge and those who want to enrich themselves by partaking in such events.

You’ll find many such websites online. Here are some of the most effective ones:

These listings show the basic event details and webinar covers. Research and pick the listing platforms carefully. It only takes a few steps to post your webinar details on these websites.

6. Use a Lead Magnet to Attract More Attendees

A webinar with an interesting topic and great speakers should be enough to attract your target audience. That said, a little something to grease the palm will further your cause more than you think.

By adding a lead magnet you’re offering something in return for the audience’s promise to attend the webinar. Lead magnets are excellent tools for lead generation. Some examples are:

For the lead magnet to work, make sure it’s something that you can deliver to the attendee immediately. For example, a guide, a discount, or marketing materials which would be instantly available after the sign-up. The lead magnet should be of some value to your prospective participants.

7. Create an Automated Email Promotion Sequence

It’s easier to convince people who are already interested in your brand. Email marketing is an excellent tactic to promote your webinar and generate more sign-ups.

Adding a reminder email sequence has the potential to boost sign-ups by 57%. Plus, you can use it in every stage of the webinar marketing funnel.

You can further increase the chances of sign-up by sending emails with personalized messages. A customized subject line is known to improve the open rate by 50%.

Not just sign-up, you can boost attendance by sending reminder emails after each attendee has signed up. A quick reminder email 24h before the upcoming webinar will increase attendance.

Most webinar platforms allow you to set up an automated email campaign and determine when would the reminder emails be sent out.

To maximize attendance, include an “Add to calendar” feature in the reminder emails. People are much more likely to attend webinars if the event link is on their calendars with all the details.

Implementing emails into your webinar marketing strategy goes a long way. After hosting a successful webinar, your attendees would love to receive follow-up emails with:

If you’re not really selling anything with your webinar, then the call-to-action could be just to sign up for the next webinar and include a link to the registration page of your next webinar. This way you’re already maximizing the webinar attendance for your next great webinar.

8. Promote Your Webinar on Social Media

Utilizing social media for virtual events is one of the most effective webinar promotion tips. LinkedIn and Facebook are the two best social media channels to promote your webinar.

LinkedIn is the ideal place to target professionals. And, the impressive engagement rate of Facebook groups must not be ignored.

Statistics show that the average open rate of Facebook messages is around 80% and the CTR is an impressive 20%.

You won’t find better places to market your webinar through video ads than LinkedIn and Facebook. Both of these social media platforms is where your prospective attendees are hanging out. It’s just a matter of targeting them correctly.

Their impressive features allow businesses to take their message to new people. These platforms also allow you to retarget people who have previously shown interest in the topic.

The most effective way to schedule this promotion across different social media channels is to use the best social media management tools. This helps you craft specific social posts according to each channel, to engage with your audience better and analyze the campaign results.

9. Use Retargeting Ads

Social media platforms and Google AdWords allow for granular audience targeting. Browsers have a dedicated customer ID that’s used to track their browsing activity and display relevant online ads.

Retargeting ads allow for webinar promotion for an audience who already showed interest in the same topic. You can create a banner ad for the upcoming webinar or you could use the paid ads in Google search if your webinar topic keyword has search volume.

By including a tracking pixel on your web page, you can retarget the visitors who have already visited your webinar landing pages.

Promoting your webinar through retargeting ads on Google or on social media is one of the most cost-effective ways for webinar promotion. It should definitely be part of your webinar strategy.

10. Publish Blog Posts to Drive More Sign-ups

Ideally, your content marketing strategy should support your webinar strategy.

Writing a blog post on a specific keyword that attracts organic traffic and mentions your upcoming webinars is an effective strategy to target key prospects who are specifically interested in your webinar topic.

As you write blog posts, don’t dive too deep into the webinar content you plan to discuss during the event. Make sure the issues discussed in a blog post piques the readers’ curiosity enough to make them register for the event.

In between the blog content you can slip CTA’s that push the readers towards the webinar.

Blog posts are versatile, which means after the webinar you can update the content and replace the CTA’s to achieve a different marketing goal.

11. Develop a Referral Strategy With Incentives

Webinar promotion opens up a way to tap into B2B influencer marketing.

Make your subscribers and past attendees your ambassadors by offering a small incentive or bonus every time they invite a friend to join the webinar. The incentive can be anything from a book to a discount.

Another under-utilized webinar marketing strategy is running an employee advocacy program. This is especially effective if your company has employees networks in different branches. Treating your employees like brand ambassadors is one of the most underappreciated marketing tactics.

Including an incentive will send the message that you value their effort. If there is a better chance of gaining more webinar sign-ups through referrals you could even start an affiliate program. It’s a good way to find affiliates.

12. Ask Your Guest Speakers to Promote the Upcoming Webinar

You can also ask your guest speakers to write a guest post for their blog. By writing to their readers, you could address a large audience, that is potentially in a similar niche that is all new leads for you.

You’ll have instant authority because you’re co-hosting a webinar with someone these readers have already subscribed to.

Either you write the blog post yourself or your guest speakers will do it themselves, make sure the blog post includes the webinar registration page link so that the audience will have an easy way to register.

The guest post should open the webinar content enough to make the prospective attendees curious enough to register. Getting a backlink from the blog articles of your guest speakers is also great for your content marketing strategy, as you’ll gain SEO value from it.

It can be helpful if your guest speakers are willing to promote the webinar on their social media as well – either on their company account or their personal account. Ideally, both.

13. Promote Your Event in Strategic Offline Locations

Why just target the audience that’s already on the internet? You can expand your target audience by getting the offline audience online and signing up for your webinar.

Place QR codes in strategic locations where they’re bound to grab the attention of your webinar target audience. When a user scans one, the QR code takes them to your landing page where they can register. Even if they don’t, you can gather all sorts of data that’ll allow you to retarget them with digital ads.

While QR codes might seem complicated, they’re actually extremely easy to make. There are plenty of free QR code generators out there. All you have to do is enter your target URL and you’re good to go.

The 3 Common Webinar Promoting Mistakes to Avoid

The aforementioned tips will ensure your effort to gain more sign-ups is off to a solid start.

That said some elements could hamper your marketing efforts. Avoiding the following mistakes is as important as implementing the webinar promotion tips listed above.

Mistake 1: Starting Your Campaign Too Late

You must be familiar with the idiom – The Early Bird Gets the Worm. Now, it’s time to act on it. When it comes to webinars it’s never too early to start.

Most webinar marketing tactics take time to create the necessary impact. Start marketing 4-6 weeks before the day of the event. Don’t be discouraged by the lack of response in the starting stages of your campaign.

Research shows that 69% of webinar sign-ups happen just a week before the event. Be patient and let our marketing ideas work their magic on the target audience.

Mistake 2: Choosing the Wrong Time, Date, and Length for the Webinar

The webinar platform you use is important, but more important is the convenience of the audience. Choose the right day to host your upcoming webinar.

Suppose your target audience is the millennial group that’s predominantly male. Hosting a webinar that coincides with a major sporting event is bound to affect the registration numbers.

Although people tend to like long webinars, as a host, you need to value their time. Ensure the webinars are of a reasonable length, ideally less than an hour. Anything longer, you will risk losing your audience.

Mistake 3: Hiring Dull Speakers

Speakers are the star attraction that draws in the crowd. And, people sign-up for webinars hoping to gain something of value.

Hence, make sure the speakers are experts and thought leaders who can delight the audience with valuable information. Something that would be highly relevant to them.

In addition, if the webinar is nearly an hour long, the presentation must be engaging and gripping to hold the audience’s attention for a long period. Use engaging experts with excellent speaking skills and people skills.

Frequently Asked Questions About Webinar Promotion

Below are some of the more common questions that marketers ask about promoting webinars.

What are the Benefits of Hosting Webinars?

Talking about the benefits of hosting webinars to you is like preaching to the converted.

You might be aware of the innumerable benefits of this marketing strategy already. So, the points mentioned in this section are aimed to encourage you to implement our tips with increased vigor.

A webinar is different from other forms of visual content because of its hands-on method of sharing information. Plus, any topic that can help the attendees succeed is worthy of a webinar.

People are eager to learn about any topic that can deliver results. This means gaining a thorough understanding which is only possible when all their questions and doubts are answered.

During a webinar, the to-and-from communication between the speaker and participants leads to a better understanding of the topic.

Webinars also have the potential to make you a thought leader and a trusted expert in your chosen field.

Then there are the obvious perks like boosting conversions and increasing dwell time.

Webinar statistics show that well-made webinars can increase the conversion rate by 19%. In addition, more than half of the people visiting the webinar landing page will sign-up.

It’s widely agreed that people prefer short videos. But this claim doesn’t apply to webinars.

On average, people spend around 53 minutes on webinars, which is ample time for you to convert the participants into leads.

How to Promote an On-demand Webinar?

The key promotion tactics remain the same for on-demand webinars. In fact, it’s even easier, since the webinar would be evergreen, not just a one-time event.

Likewise, social media advertising is an effective webinar promotion strategy here. Schedule promotions for your webinar on Facebook and LinkedIn to maximize webinar attendance.

When creating on-demand webinars, be sure to use some of the best automated webinar platforms, since they have some built-in tools to promote on different marketing channels.

Summary of How to Promote a Webinar

To summarize the strategies for webinar promotion, start with an attractive topic. To host a personalized webinar, address a real problem on the market and explain how to solve it.

When designing your webinar registration page, make sure it includes a countdown timer and exit intent pop-ups to maximize sign-ups.

Set up an email sequence with reminder emails to maximize attendance. These reminder emails should definitely include the “Add to calendar” feature.

When promoting your webinar, produce different marketing materials and advertise them on social media. Utilize paid media and online ads to give an extra boost. These should be your key promotions channels.

Utilize influencer marketing strategies for your webinar promotion. If you’re selling high-ticket products on your webinar, it might make sense to even launch an affiliate program to boost sign-ups.

If you follow these webinar promotion tips, you’ll ensure that your great webinar will have the number of attendees it deserves.

Erkki Muuga

Erkki has over 10 years of experience as a software product manager and a proven track record in building and growing SaaS products. He has a keen eye for key differentiating factors and spotting truly valuable software features that enable business use cases.