How to Promote a Webinar: 13 Ways to Drive Registrations

Even before the popularization of remote work, webinars were a prominent force in the world of internal and external communication. 

Today, they are among the pillars of online training and lead generation. 

For example, a case study by Shauna Lynn Simon shows that she generated $2200 ROI (Return on Investment) from a single one-hour webinar. 

The message is clear. 

You need to start using webinars to grow your business. 

Of course, the first step is to create a great webinar deck, but your webinar will get results only if your target prospects register and attend the event. 

A successful webinar is the result of stellar and thoughtful webinar promotion efforts. 

With that in mind, let’s look at the best webinar promotion strategies below. 

The trick to marketing a webinar is to treat it just like a new product or service launch.

Here’s what we’ll cover in this article:

1. Get your webinar promotion timing right
2. Optimize your webinar landing page
3. Partner with a brand or influencer
4. Involve your employees in webinar marketing
5. Send personalized webinar invites
6. Offer a free incentive
7. Harness your email list
8. Advertise on your web properties
9. Turn to your social media channels
10. Participate in communities and groups
11. Team up with other brands
12. Involve speakers in webinar promotion
13. Create bite-sized video clips

If you prefer to watch this guide in video format, we’ve got you covered below.

Studies have shown that you can get higher conversion rates on specific days and times as compared to others. 

For instance, webinar platform ON24 analyzed thousands of webinars to shape its 2020 Webinar Benchmark report. Over 50 percent of registrants sign up at least eight days before the webinar. 

This shows how important it is to promote your upcoming webinar much sooner than the date of the webinar. We recommend you start at least a month in advance. 

On that note, here are some timing guidelines to schedule your webinar promotions:

• Tuesdays are known to trigger the most registrations, which can be as high as 24 percent of total signups. Make sure to initiate key promotions every Tuesday.
  
• Mornings, especially between 8 and 10 am, are known for a spike in registrations. So, based on the timezone of your prospects, schedule promotions in the early part of the day.
• Consider scheduling your webinar between Tuesdays to Thursdays while avoiding Mondays and Fridays. Research shows days in the middle of the week tend to yield better webinar attendance rates compared to weekends.

Your webinar registration page can make or break your signup rate. Make sure it’s optimized to convey the full value of attending your webinar. 

Tweak it to include persuasive content and graphics, along with benefit-oriented headlines, authority badges, social proof, and video testimonials from past webinar attendees.

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, and there are no outbound links to distract the visitor. It focused only on getting the visitor to complete the registration form.

Here are additional steps you can take to make your webinar page the best it can be: 

• Reduce form fields. The easier it is to fill out the form, the more people will sign up for your webinar. Only ask for what’s essential. 

• Include a video, as they can have a positive impact on conversion rates. You can easily create short, branded video clips with Piktochart Video, along with the ability to automatically add subtitles to your video, plus other customization features.
• Include some kind of social proof on your webinar’s landing page. Testimonials from past attendees or industry experts can instill confidence in potential participants.
• Optimize the webinar registration form for mobile devices is crucial in today’s mobile-driven world. Ensure the form is responsive and easy to fill out on smartphones and tablets.
• Incorporate scarcity marketing tactics, such as limited-time offers or early bird discounts, to create a sense of urgency and motivate visitors to register for upcoming webinars.

Brands are increasingly investing in influencer marketing and building relationships with social media superstars. In fact, influencer marketing worldwide is expected to have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32 percent by 2025.

This is an opportunity you should not miss when marketing your webinar. Collaborating with an industry influencer can give your webinar extra credibility and exposure. 

The first step is to find the top influencers in your industry. Then, reach out to them with a message like this:

When partnering with an influencer, make sure to make it easy to promote your webinar. Give them ready-to-publish social media posts, videos, and other marketing materials they can copy and paste quickly. 

When it comes to promoting a webinar on social media, your employees can be your greatest asset.

Not convinced? A FleishmanHillard Global Study revealed that an organization’s employees are three times more credible than the CEO. This means that your customers are more likely to listen and believe employees than your official brand social media accounts. 

Whatever social media posts you plan to share on your company’s channels, 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. 

You can even add an infographic to your newsletter to it make it more engaging. As an example, you can get started with the following infographic template about social media best practices.

Then, as with influencers and partners, make it easy for them to participate and contribute to your company’s webinar promotion efforts. For example, use a centralized platform to keep all the marketing collateral in one place. This way, your employees can access and share materials easily with their networks. 

There’s no doubt that personalization can help brands build stronger customer relationships.

However, you can’t write personalized messages or schedule one-to-one meetings with every prospect, as it’s not scalable. But there’s no reason to overlook your most important prospects. These are the people who are close to making a purchase or those who have bought from you before.

Your sales team can quickly identify such prospects. Work with your other team members to write personalized webinar invites for these key prospects. Get inspired with the example below.

Here are some tips to help you write a great webinar invite:

• Generate a catchy subject line. Your subject line determines if the prospect will open your message. If you understand your prospects’ pain points, you’ll know how to grab their attention from the get-go. 
  
• Be brief and concise. Don’t overload your prospects with webinar content. The invitation is a short teaser that creates intrigue for the entire 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 your webinar.

Give your audience another reason to register for the webinar with a well-thought-out lead magnet. It’s a great bonus as people wait for the entire webinar. 

A lead magnet warms the prospect before the webinar and 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
• eBook

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 Piktochart Visual to create infographics, reports, and presentations, while you can use Piktochart Video to record and edit videos. 

To create a report in Piktochart, go to your Piktochart Dashboard and select Reports from the left sidebar menu. From there, you can choose a template or make one from scratch.

Email marketing can hugely impact your webinar’s attendance and overall success. It is one of the best ways to convert a prospect into a webinar registrant.

Unlike a standard email’s 18 percent average open rate, webinar emails can reach open rates as high as 72 percent. 

Create an email series for your webinar and set it on autopilot for the people in your email list. Here’s an example of an email sequence to help you get started:

• 1st email: Share a blog post related to your webinar, along with a call to action to register for the webinar.
  
• 2nd email: Introduce the speakers and what makes them worth listening to. Give a teaser for the webinar content. 
  
• 3rd email: Remind your audience one day before the webinar.
  
• 4th email: Remind your audience one hour before the webinar.
  
• 5th email: Thank your audience right after the webinar and share a recording, especially those who missed it. 

Recommended reading: How to Design Visually Appealing Emails 

To make sure that your emails reach their final destination, it is best to check your email deliverability with a DMARC record checker.

Finally, don’t stop sending emails to your webinar prospects and attendees once the email series has run out. If you have their permission, add them to another automated email campaign that will be of value to them.

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 that get the most website visitors and display an ad for your webinar, like in the example below.

Here are some ideas that will come in handy:

• Stick your banner advert to the Resources and Events areas 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 blog’s main page and your blog. 
  
• When someone subscribes to your newsletter or purchases a product, display your banner ad on your 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. 
  
• If your webinar aims to introduce new products, you can write relevant knowledge base articles to provide helpful information about your products. Those professional and easy-to-digest articles will help visitors quickly understand your services and increase your customer base. 

As of 2023, over 4.9 billion people have been using social media worldwide. And this number is projected to increase to almost 5.85 billion in 2027. 

This goes to show that 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 upcoming webinar. 

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. You can use Piktochart Visual and Piktochart Video to create engaging social media graphics and videos.
• LinkedIn InMail has great potential for B2B brands to launch message campaigns generating visitors for their landing pages and webinars. Utilizing software like LinkedHelper can help create personalized invites and reach out to a very segmented audience generating positive conversions.

• 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. MeetEdgar’s guide to using hashtags is a good read!

The web is filled with discussion forums and other types of communities related to your niche. The following groups can be the perfect avenue to spread the word about your webinar:

• Public Slack workspaces
• Facebook groups
• Discord communities
• Reddit forums
• 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 genuinely adding value to the ongoing conversations first. 

You can increase engagement even more by involving members in shaping your webinar, just like in the example below. 

Partnerships can drive more than 20% of your business revenue.

You can double your reach by cross-promoting with another business when promoting a webinar. It’s a low-cost strategy that will not just 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, the tweet below shows how Piktochart 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 and divide 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 all the marketing materials and provide a giveaway to promote the webinar. 

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 collaterals they might need to invite their audience and contacts. The materials will include:

• The hashtag(s) relevant to your webinar
• The complete agenda and date/time of the webinar. 
• Links to landing pages, flyers, and social media graphics 
• Videos from past webinars (You can edit them with Piktochart Video!). 

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. 

This tactic doesn’t directly promote your webinar but fuels every other best practice covered in this blog post. 

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. In fact, 85.7 percent of marketers agree that video is now more important for brands than other forms of content.

With a tool like Piktochart Video, you don’t need complex video editing software or a professional video production team. You can easily repurpose videos from previous webinars, edit your Zoom recordings, or just record yourself through your webcam. 

Not just that, but once you upload a video, the subtitles will be generated automatically. From there, you can customize your video and captions as you see fit. 

Select the part to modify or delete any part of the text or video. 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 and share on social media and other marketing channels.

In summary, make sure to keep your target audience in mind and be thoughtful of whom you partner with. Granted, hosting a successful webinar takes a lot. But if done right, your efforts will not go in vain.

It’ll take some time to fine-tune an effective webinar promotion strategy. With so many ways to promote upcoming webinars, the key is to be bold and experiment with different promotional channels. Monitor results to see what gave you high signups compared to attendance rates, and keep building on previous campaigns.

Finally, don’t forget the potential of short, bite-sized clips when it comes to webinar marketing. Create a free Piktochart account to promote your webinar with engaging videos.