Stephanie Donelson

Education should be a big part of your content marketing strategy. You’re trying to educate your customers about the industry and the benefits of your product or service, and teach them how to be successful in their own right. 

Focusing on education instead of only sales pitches can help your customers trust you faster and rely on you as a valuable resource for information – thus trusting you when it’s time to make a purchase. 

Webinars are a great marketing tactic for continued education and establishing your brand as a thought leader and trustworthy partner, as well as generating and nurturing leads. 

But, it can be hard to run a successful webinar series, especially if your competition has already been doing them for a while or you don’t have a full strategy in place for how you’ll execute them and why you’re doing them. 

In this post, learn how to create a strong foundation for your webinars, how to promote it to drive up registrations, and how to maximize your webinars’ marketing potential. 

10 tips to get the most out of your webinars

1. Put webinars in your marketing strategy & content calendar

One of the easiest ways to make sure your webinar works with your brand and content is to have it included in your strategy and content calendar from the get-go. This can help you narrow down appropriate topics based on what’s already on your calendar and makes it work seamlessly with other content your brand produces.

Like any marketing tactic, you don’t want to do it just to do it. There needs to be thought behind it and a goal you want to accomplish. Are you trying to drive up brand awareness? Drive leads? Nurture leads? Establish your brand as a leader in the industry? Figure out what your end goal is with your webinars and you’ll be able to create better ones.

You should also think about when you want your webinars to hit. Do you want to host a webinar right before a big conference or industry event to encourage people to visit your booth? Do you want to host your webinar between event cycles to keep your name top of mind? Can you use a webinar as a tactic in a larger campaign? 

Think through these questions to plan ahead for the best time to host your webinar. If you know your industry is in a slump in June and not really active, you might want to stay away from June dates unless you have a really cool topic that’ll generate a lot of interest. 

2. Hosting

Next up is figuring out if you want to host and run the webinar by yourself or partner with someone else in the industry, like an event association or trade publication. There are pros and cons to each way of running your webinar.

Self-hosted pros:

• You own the content and can keep it on your website or YouTube channel
• You can run webinars on whatever dates you please
• It could be more cost-effective in the long-run to run your own webinars

Self-hosted cons:

• You might not be able to reach as large of an audience as you could with a partner
• You have to find the right webinar software to run the event

Partner hosting pros:

• They’ll run the event and moderate everything, leaving you just to do the speaking portion
• They’ll send out registration reminders and encourage sign-ups
• They probably already have a good reputation for putting on webinars

Partner hosting cons:

• They own the content and recording
• They might only keep the recording for a set amount of time before it disappears
• The sponsorship fee may be more per webinar than just buying the software yourself

This is why you need to plan out your webinar strategy to determine if this is something feasible and sustainable to run on your own or if it’s better to do a few one-off webinars with a trusted partner throughout the year. 

If you do host your own, you should at least commit to one per quarter to keep a regular and consistent schedule of webinars, otherwise people will forget if you do them sporadically and randomly. 

3. It all comes down to content

A webinar is not a sales pitch!

A webinar is not a sales pitch! Yes, I meant to write that twice because this can be a hard thing for first-time webinar organizers. 

I’ve worked with a lot of sales staff and executives who want to do a webinar but have it be a non-stop promotion of the brand’s services. No! No one wants to attend that webinar and they’ll feel like you were dishonest with them and will most likely never sign up for another webinar with you ever again. 

Your webinar should be educational, informational, and applicable to the audience regardless of whether or not they use your product or service. A webinar is not a commercial, it’s a class. That’s not to say you can’t introduce your company and its offerings at the beginning and share a reminder at the end, but your entire webinar cannot just be about the company.

When it comes to thinking about your webinar’s content, try to think of these common webinar types:

• Pain points/challenges
• Tips and tricks or best practices
• Top 10 lists
• Advanced tactics in your industry
• How-tos
• Industry topic 101
• Trends in the industry
• Benefits of X
• Saving costs in your industry
• Measuring success in your industry

You can also use your website’s analytics or reports from your marketing automation tool to discover what topics are already popular with your audience and turn that into a webinar. 

4. Add an incentive

If you really want to ramp up registrants and get people to attend, you might even consider an incentive or giveaway to a random winner. Perhaps it’s an advanced copy of an industry report, a complimentary ebook, or even the chance to win a gift card of some sort. 

Incentives can be a great way to drive up registrations when you’re first starting out, just be sure to follow through and share with everyone who won in your follow-up email. Something like, “Congratulations, Brad L., for winning the drawing! Join us for our next webinar on November 16 for your chance to win.”

5. Promotion plan

Work backwards from your webinar date and start promoting it! There are several channels you can use to promote your upcoming webinar:

• Website: Have a dedicated page on your website where you share webinar-related information and links for registration. You may have this page split into upcoming and past webinars, making it easy for people to find what they’re looking for
• Email confirmation: Send an email confirmation after they’ve registered and include the option for them to add it to their calendar from the email
• Email reminders: 1 week before, one day before, morning of
• Sponsored emails: Running any sponsored email content? Be sure your webinar is included in that lineup 
• Sponsored content: Running any advertorials or online sponsored content before your event? Use your CTA at the end to encourage them to sign up for your webinar to learn more on the topic
• Social media posts: Start sharing info about your webinar one or two months out on social, and then post a few reminders two weeks out, one week out, a day out, and the day of
• Teaser trailer: Act like your webinar is the major production it is by creating a 15-second or 30-second teaser trailer for it
• Blogs: Publish a blog one or two weeks before the event on reasons why people should attend your webinar
• Sales team: Ask your sales team to reach out to their prospects, leads, and customers and share information about the webinar 

6. Short and simple

Aim to have your webinar last between half an hour and 45 minutes with time for Q&A. You may even want to have a few seed questions ready for your Q&A to kick things off and make people feel comfortable asking their questions. 

7. Make it interactive

Add polling questions, pop quizzes, or surveys in your webinar to break it up and make it interactive. Keep your questions related to the topics in your webinar, this isn’t the time for random trivia! This can be a great way to learn more about your audience, their challenges, or what they need from a product or service but in a non-salesy way. 

8. Ask for feedback

At the end of your webinar, have a pop-up or send an email with a brief survey where attendees can provide feedback on your webinar and share topics they’d like to see in the future – double win! Not only are they telling you exactly what they’d sign up for in the future, you now have some new content marketing ideas to draw from.

9. Thank attendees

Send a follow-up email thanking attendees for their time and share a link to where they can find a recording of your webinar that they can watch on-demand. You might also point them in the direction of other resources, like ebooks or supplementary blog posts if they want to continue their education. 

10. Share webinar recordings

Finally, make your past webinars work for you by sharing them as evergreen content. Link to them from social media, in relevant automated drip campaigns, or in the signature of your sales team. 

Do you use webinars in your marketing strategy? Share your tips and tricks for using them successfully in the comments below or on Twitter!