A webinar is essentially an online seminar where you talk to your audience about your business and how it can help them. It's also an incredibly powerful way to turn leads into paying customers. So if you have the means and the time to put together and present a webinar, you should absolutely do it.
Prepping for a webinar takes time. You need to determine your subject, write your content, create and design topic slides, put everything together, and promote your webinar so that people actually come watch it.
After all, there's no use wasting all of your time putting together a webinar if there's no one in your audience.
So how do you get an audience interested in your webinar?
Promoting it on social media is a great way to start! After all, your online audience is likely going to want to learn more about an online informational offering.
Let's go through a few of the ways that you can use social media marketing to promote and generate an audience for your next webinar.
1. Choose your platforms.
Before your webinar, you need to decide which social media channels you want to put the most effort into. Typically Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are going to be your webinar sweet spots, but you also want to consider where your audience is spending their time. Instagram and YouTube are internationally utilized with lots of internet traffic, do not dismiss them as possibilities for promotion.
If your webinar is catered to B2B companies, then you absolutely want to be sharing the sign-up link on LinkedIn. If you're in the tech world, Twitter is perfect for you. And pretty much any business can post something on Facebook and Instagram as they've got at least one part of their audience there to see it. After all, with more than 2.6 billion active users, Facebook is the most popular social media platform worldwide.
2. Create your posting schedule.
About three weeks before your planned webinar date, you want to really ramp up your promotions. Share quick teaser snippets alongside a link to your webinar registration page. Include graphics or stock photos that are both visually appealing and represent your topic. Websites like Unsplash and Pexels are perfect for finding a great accompanying stock photo.
Include the big thing that your webinar will be teaching as well as the date and time you're hosting it front and center in your social media post. Check out social media ads to promote your webinar to reach an even larger audience and further increase your chances of generating leads and conversions.
Every platform always has best practices about days and times that supposedly receive the most engagement, but those statistics are arbitrary. Instead, you should be interested in when your audience is online, not when everyone on the platform is online.
On Facebook and Instagram, you'll want to dive into your Page's insights to find information on when the people who like your Page are actually logged on and engaged. Twitter and LinkedIn require other means. Try Tweriod for Twitter to find out when you should be posting, and think about when the businesspeople you're targeting are checking LinkedIn. In the morning while drinking their coffee? On their lunch break? Towards the end of the day?
Response rates within the two weeks prior to your webinar are likely to be at an all-time high, so be sure to increase your promotions then. Share your webinar registration page multiple times a day on Twitter (with an 18-minute lifespan, tweets can be repetitive without any of your followers being the wiser), once a day on Instagram, and a couple of times a week on Facebook and LinkedIn.
3. Live tweet your webinar.
Okay, so you've been posting to social media for the past few weeks to ramp up audience interest in your webinar. Throughout your webinar, you plan to discuss your topic with your audience and teach them why they need to learn more about it.
Webinars are a strange breed--you're not actually trying to teach something to your audience. Instead, you're trying to change their mindset on how they view something. You're trying to empower them to make a change in their life or their business. That is how you close the sale.
Once you've generated an audience for your webinar, you want to drop awesome little knowledge bombs throughout that help them realize that you really know what you're doing and what you're talking about. That's how you get them to buy your product or service. And that's why webinars can be so powerful for new launches.
But your promotion doesn't have to end when the webinar starts.
Instead, keep it going. Live tweet those knowledge bombs to get people intrigued. Then, let them know you're offering a limited-time only recording of your awesome webinar. This will create a sense of urgency and get even more people to sign up to receive the recording. All new leads, and a ton of potential new customers.
4. Continue your promotion after the webinar.
Share the link to get the replay on your social media for a week or two after your webinar. Or, you can even use that replay in place of future live webinars.
After all, you're a busy business owner, right? You don't have the time to host a live webinar once a week, even though you know that's the best practice to generate as much hype and buzz about your new product as possible. Once you've done a webinar or two and you've got your perfect recording, you can continue to promote webinars and register audience members for a webinar that's actually a previously recorded session.
Put together a social media sequence of promo posts every few weeks for a new "live" webinar session to continue to generate new audience members and leads. This is the perfect way to run your lead generation and webinar strategy on autopilot.
Thinking about hosting a webinar for your next launch? Contact us to learn how we can help!
Written By: David Carpenter
