Everyone who organized a webinar at least once knows that the most difficult and important is to attract quality audience. If you are a digital specialist, a business coach or a facilitator, this case is right for you.
Webinar promo requires an integrated approach allowing to increase your reach, keep the audience interested and bring them to your webinar.
It is even more relevant when promoting free webinars. Every day, people process tons of information, and unless you stir up interest of potential participants all the time, they will simply forget about the webinar. As a rule, when someone has paid money for a webinar, they mark this event in their calendars, plan for the future, and they don’t even need anyone to remind them about the event. But if a webinar is free, the majority of people can simply forget about it — such events are hardly included in the daily “priorities”.
According to the statistics, webinars are visited approximately by one third of all registered users. Therefore, don’t be surprised if out of 100 people, less than a half comes. However, if webinars reach less than 35% of the registered listeners, reconsider each stage of user interaction. Probably, webinars participants simply don’t receive reminders of an online event in time.
Below, we will show the step-by-step promotional plan for a free webinar aimed at generating 100+ registrations from experts in the following industries: mechanical engineering, automotive industry, aircraft industry.
To attract audience to an online webinar, we launched advertising campaign in different digital channels. For a bigger effect, we connected industry-specific portals.
Ad campaign planning
1 month before the webinar. The platform for the webinar is selected, the landing page is ready, we have speakers. The most important part to go — to reach people. Our preliminary plan is to bring 100+ participants.
Before we started our advertising campaign, we:
— Evaluated market size;
— Defined campaign objectives: for this purpose, we specified the “pains” of our audience, what they need and how to give it to them;
— Answered a question: where to look for these people, how to communicate with them. Segmented audience and picked up promo sources.
The tools we used
- The webinar website
- Targeted social network advertising
- Contextual advertising: Yandex Advertising Network (YAN) and Google Display Network
- Advertising in LinkedIn
- Publications on industry-specific portals
1. The webinar website
In order to register applications, the client made a simple one-page website and placed it on a webinar platform. The landing structure is made so it gradually brings the visitor to the decision to register.
First, we revealed the main information about the conference
— Told about date, place and time of the event.
— Presented speakers, topics and summaries of presentations.
— Specified primary benefits of our webinar in the marked list
Thought over the right title and subtitle, which are the extremely important elements of a landing page, because the visitor sees them first of all.
Located the block with the call to the target action and the contact form on the first screen. The call to action was located on the bright-colored registration button.
Optimized the webinar page according to the following check list:
- Registration form should not consist of many fields. According to the statistics, each additional field in the registration form costs you 5% of potential clients. That is, adding 3 additional fields, there is a risk to repel 15% of them. Hence, leave only the minimum number of fields: 2-3 ideally.
- The webinar page should not contain links to other pages of the website. It is important that the page is isolated, with no links to other pages in order to prevent website visitors from following them.
- The webinar page should provide social proofs. You can increase visitors’ trust through the proofs, for example through the positive feedback on your previous webinars; information on the outstanding speaker invited to your event, etc.
Remember that the primary purpose of the landing page is conversion of the incoming traffic from visitors to listeners. Make it intuitive, leading to only one target action — registration for a webinar.
2. Targeted advertising
We promoted posts on Facebook and Instagram by means of targeted advertising in order to address those who will be interested by the webinar and expand the post reach. The audience was targeted according to their interests, jobs, with certain age limits. We used the “Advertising Post in Feed” format. All advertisements brought visitors to the landing page of the webinar.
3. Contextual advertising
One of the most expensive but effective methods. Show advertising via search engines to those who look for such events or make related requests. Here it is very important to adjust campaigns properly and avoid inappropriate expenditures (wrong targeting, ineffective bidding strategy, unselected minus words, etc.).
In this part, success or fail is 90% up to the qualification of experts and their approach to work. Thus, we decided on the list of key requests to help target audience find our landing page.
The webinar brand is not complete yet, so we have not made search advertising yet, but we’ve set up advertisement in Yandex Advertising Network (YAN) and Google Display Network.
Advertisements on the partner websites of search engines help to grab the attention of the audience knowing nothing about the product yet.
To adjust advertising campaign in networks, the audience was divided into segments, and each segment got its own group of advertisements.
4. Advertising in LinkedIn
The professional social network LinkedIn is a huge segment for b2b projects, and in most cases, it is easier to reach the necessary expert here than on other social networks.
The main advantage of this channel is the possibility to target a narrow professional audience. CPC on this website is high, nevertheless advertisers who perfectly know their target audience and can’t reach it in other advertising channels can get registrations from LinkedIn at a very reasonable price. It is especially relevant for the b2b segment. We targeted our audience according to the industries and positions.
5. Advertising in LinkedIn
The main objective — to create loyalty and knowledge via the portal trusted by professional community. For these purposes, we used a banner on the main page, on the first screen, with dynamic placement
Results
- In 3 weeks of the active advertising campaign, we attracted 64% more registrations than we had planned
- CPL was 41% below the plan
- Our Top Channels for event promotion:
1) Targeted advertising in Instagram – second-to-none.
2) It is followed by Google Display Network,
3) FB,
4) LinkedIn
5) YAN.
We got the biggest number of registrations in the last week before a webinar, thanks to the effective weekly budget management.