According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), 77% of B2B marketers are using educational content to nurture their audiences. Moreover, 64% of B2B marketers have increased their use of audio and visual content, which includes videos and webinars.
However, it’s not enough to just create webinars. You can’t just expect people to sign up out of the blue and attend your webinar. You have to make an effort to promote it. The best way to promote your webinar is through social media. I have used social media to promote my webinars and it has resulted in impressive attendance; besides reaching almost a thousand people, I also generated 238 clicks for the link. Even the CMI study cited earlier found that 61% of B2B marketers have increased their use of social media for content marketing since the previous year. In this article, we are going to share 5 effective tips for promoting your webinar on social media based on the tactics that have worked for me.
#1: Use visuals in your promotion
If you want to stand out on social media, you need to use visuals. According to Social Media Examiner, visual images were the most important form of content for marketers, while videos came in third.
If you’re going to use social media to promote your webinar, you need to prepare visual content to go along with it. This could be anything from original graphics to teaser videos. Rather than just sharing a link or posting about the webinar in a text post, visuals can attract your target audience more effectively.
The graphics could include attractive images and details of the webinar or you can create teaser videos that clearly explain the purpose of the webinar. For example, ClickMeeting created a teaser video to promote their webinar with Jamie Turner, CEO of 60 Second Marketer, as part of their series of influencer-hosted webinars about webinars. In the video, Jamie introduced himself, talked about what he would be covering in the webinar, and encouraged people to register. The teaser video managed to get more than 2,000 views from one tweet alone.
#2: Add a clear CTA
It’s not enough to tell people about your webinar. You should also tell them what they should do next after viewing your content. This means you need to provide a clear call-to-action (CTA) to tell them the next step of the process. Your CTA could be in the form of text in your caption and in your promotional images. Additionally, you could have the webinar host include a verbal CTA in your teaser video.
When I hosted a webinar with PowerPost a few months back, I used social media and email marketing to promote it. For my social media promotion, I created an original image which included my photo and details of the webinar.
To ensure people knew exactly what to do next, I included two CTAs within the caption, as you can see in the screenshot above. To make an even bigger impact, I also included a “Book Now” CTA button below the image.
#3: Create an engaging landing page
When people click on your webinar link on social media, they should be taken to a landing page specifically designed for that webinar. This should be the first step before you start promoting your webinar. Without a properly-designed landing page, you could easily confuse potential attendees and cause them to leave before registering. In addition to having all of the details of the webinar, your landing page should also have a form to collect basic contact information such as an email address and name. Try to avoid collecting too much information, as you could end up annoying people.
You could further optimize your landing page by embedding a teaser video. Although you may already be sharing teaser videos on social media, having another one on your landing page can help you engage your audience. The video could be a great way to explain the purpose and benefits of your webinar without boring your audience. For people who aren’t keen on reading through blocks of text to understand what your webinar is all about, your video will provide them with the necessary information. That means you’re likely to get more people to sign up. In fact, adding a video to your landing page can drive more conversions.
Eyeview Digital conducted several A/B tests on landing pages to see the impact of video on conversions. In one test, there was a 31.97% higher conversion rate when a video was added to a landing page. And in another test, adding a video to a landing page resulted in an 86% higher conversion rate. Take a look at how Workfront embedded a video to their webinar registration page.
#4: Optimize your landing page for sharing
Besides optimizing your landing page content and adding a teaser video, you should also optimize it for sharing. Since you want to promote the webinar mainly through social media, you need to get help from the people who are already interested in attending by getting them to promote it for you. This means getting them to share your webinar on social media and directing their network to your landing page.
Adding social sharing buttons on your webinar landing page is a simple, yet effective way, to accomplish this. These buttons can have a significant impact on the actions of people who visit your site. Optimizing social share buttons helped increase content shares by 200% for Upworthy. The same could work for your webinar landing page as well.
Once people finish registering for your webinar, you could encourage them to share the news with their followers on social media. There’s a good chance you could attract some potential attendees within their networks, increasing your registration rate.
In the following screenshot, you can see the landing page for a webinar hosted by Wave.video. They have included clear CTAs and eye-catching visuals, and beneath the CTA button, you can also see the social sharing buttons which makes it easier to promote the webinar instantly on social media.
#5: Run ads
Finally, you can further enhance the impact of your promotion efforts by running social media ads. Although, if you’re going to make the most out of these ads, you need to carefully design them with attractive visuals and compelling copy. And of course, you will need to target the most relevant people for these social media ads.
Major Impact Media used Facebook ads to promote a webinar for one of their clients. Within only nine months, they managed to scale webinar registrations from 0 to 49,000. After generating revenue of $153,945, their cost per registration stood at $2.22, and their overall ROI on customer acquisition was 42.5%.
You can also partner with the top influencers in your niche to spread the word about your webinar. They can help you reach wider audiences who are more likely to be interested in your webinar topic. However, you need to create content that is worth promoting to your influencers’ audiences.
The takeaway
These are some of the most effective steps that have helped me promote my webinars on social media. You could follow each step or just try one of them and see how it goes for you. You can make adjustments and customizations to each tactic per your requirements.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on socialbakers.com. Any statistics or statements included in this article were current at the time of original publication.
