As video content continues its meteoric rise, webinars are becoming an increasingly popular modality for businesses to generate leads, conversations, and sales. Additionally, consumers are more consistently turning to this video forum for reliable advice from industry leaders.
In 2016, the number of webinars hosted increased by an impressive 35%, resulting in over half a million broadcasts throughout the year. As video continues to surge, there’s no doubt webinars are too. If you’re not in on the action yet, it’s time.
Naturally, social media is one of the most powerful channels to drive awareness and signups for upcoming events. Webinar promotion, however, is where most marketers and business owners get tripped up in the launch process.
ClickMeeting, a leading webinar service provider, created a fantastic webinar promotion timeline infographic that details exactly how and when organizers should be posting to ensure that event signups are maximized. Check out the insights below:
With this flowchart, marketers can easily assemble a promotional strategy to generate awareness for their webinar.
What about the types of content you should be producing? You not only want to catch a user’s attention, but also excite them about attending your event; that’s where this article has you covered.
Here are 4 types of content that will engage users and drive webinar attendance.
Choose Your Content Wisely
The benefit of social media is that everybody’s on it. The drawback is that everybody’s on it. Which means your audience is limited, but the noise is relentless. Standing out from the crowd is a tall order.
You have to meticulously cherry pick the most compelling forms of content in order to generate awareness. If you elect to simply post updates saying that you have a webinar coming up, no one will listen or care.
That means that in-depth blogs, image posts, videos, and social adverts are going to be your best friends throughout this promotional process.
Comprehensive Commentary
Despite the massive popularity attached to video content, blogs and articles are still masterful materials for educating and convincing audiences.
For the purposes of a webinar, these materials need to be crafted to position presenters as thought leaders in their field.
This can be accomplished by identifying pain points associated with the content that your webinar will cover and writing in-depth pieces on the subject.
Create posts that extensively explore each given topic and ensure they provide tangible solutions (but don’t give everything away). This shows your audience that you understand the issues, and have intimate, credible knowledge of the solutions.
These are the types of posts that get shared far and wide on social media because they contain real and meaningful content.
And considering that long-form content generally ranks better than thin material, there’s a good change you’ll generate a decent amount of organic traffic through the SERPs as well.
Just be sure to include a shameless promotion for your webinar at the end that reveals the value proposition to readers along with compelling CTAs and links to the appropriate landing pages.
Images that Inspire
While video has certainly overthrown images as the most compelling form of content on social, pictures and illustrations are still extremely effective.
On Instagram, image engagement is still through the roof compared to other social destinations. Instagram’s engagement rate reaches upwards of 2.3% per follower. On Facebook, engagement peaks around 0.2%, while other social networks are even worse off.
Use this to your advantage by creating visually arresting images to promote your webinar and link to the sign up page in your bio. You can also leverage Instagram ads with these same images and target interested audiences with its refined targeting features.
Broadcast Live about Your Live Broadcast
Is there a better way to promote your upcoming video content than with more video content? Likely not.
This means that Live Streaming video should be one of your go-to promotional tools.
In the past several years, live video services like Periscope and Facebook Live have exploded with content and popularity. What’s even more impressive than the sheer number of live broadcasts, however, is the insane engagement rates some of these videos generate.
Make sure to leverage Facebook Live as a means to build awareness and excitement about your webinar by hosting video chats covering the pain points you will address, the knowledge that attendees stand to gain, and information about the experts joining your webinar. You can also offer previews of what’s to come by sharing one or two of the most valuable insights your webinar covers.
Have the courage to give away some of your best information. As much as this may be counterintuitive, it’s the formula for loyalty and engagement.
Additionally, once your live broadcasts have ended, share these across your social properties to educate all of your followers about the forthcoming event.
Leverage Video Adverts for Maximum Leads
As an added bonus to going live on Facebook, you can use editing tools to chop up your live streams and create video adverts on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, generating even more signups.
When you’re working with Facebook and Instagram, Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences are invaluable tools as these help to target your existing customers and those who share similar qualities as those folks, leading to increased chances of registrations.
Keep these adverts between 30 and 60 seconds long. According to studies from Kinetic Social, this is the ideal length.
Bonus Tip: Signature Webinar Publicity
While this one is not necessarily related to social media, email marketing is a complimentary avenue you should pursue for webinar promotion.
Think about this: How many emails do you send every day to all your contacts? Why not use that as an additional space of lead generation?
WiseStamp is a company that allows users to generate compelling, professional, and creative email signatures. You can use the company’s Gmail signatures or Outlook signatures as an ingenious way to promote your webinar while simultaneously driving people to your social channels – where you are also promoting your webinar. This is cross-channel marketing at its finest.
If you’re getting into the webinar game, go big. Use ClickMeeting’s infographic as a road map. Create meaningful content. Be diverse, direct, and aggressive with your promotions. And knock the socks off of all your loyal attendees.
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