How to Promote a Webinar on LinkedIn — 10 steps!

More and more, B2B marketers are turning to webinars to accomplish a wide array of marketing goals. But webinars only can be successful if they’re promoted effectively. In this post, we’ll teach you how to promote a webinar on LinkedIn – the premier social network of B2B professionals, and a potentially rich source of new prospects.

Hosting a webinar is one of the best ways to keep your key audiences engaged. They give you a way to directly connect with prospects and customers, establish brand authority, and increase awareness – all while sharing valuable information that your audience will thank you for.

There’s a reason why 72% of marketers say webinars directly and positively impact their pipeline and revenue and 56% say they plan to increase the number of webinars they produce in 2021 (ON24).

But people have to see it. You could have the best webinar in the world but without an audience, you’ve got nothing. That’s why, in this article, we’re going to show you how to promote a webinar on LinkedIn. But first…

Why a Webinar?

If you’ve never used webinars for marketing, you might be wondering why you should start. A fair question considering that webinar technology was launched back in the 1990s. Technology moves fast, after all. Is there really a benefit to still using webinars in the 2020s?

Yes. Yes, there is.

Webinars consistently rank among the highest for most engaging types of marketing content. And they’re becoming increasingly interactive and immersive. Nearly 70% of all webinars in April 2020 offered resources that attendees could download and engage with (ON24).

Not only that but ON24 reports that audiences in 2020 consumed 290% more webinar content than in 2019 (168,615 hours in 2020 compared to 42,913 hours in 2019). And, more than half of all webinars (52%) are getting 100 attendees or more with nearly a quarter of webinars (24%) bringing in 500+ attendees.

Are you one of the 58% of B2B marketers using webinars in your content marketing programs? You should be (even if you’re not a B2B brand)!

Why LinkedIn?

Event marketers have a bad habit of overlooking LinkedIn. But while other companies didn’t have such a great 2020, LinkedIn’s revenue actually grew by 24% in the second quarter of 2020 alone. LinkedIn also boasts more than 756 million users, 60 million of which are high-level professionals in their industries and leaders in their companies, along with more than 57 million companies (LinkedIn).

LinkedIn offers high organic reach without tons of competition when it comes to events. The platform drives almost 80% of all B2B leads (Octopost) and is 277% more effective at generating leads than Twitter and Facebook (Hubspot). This makes sense when you consider that LinkedIn drives 46% of social traffic to B2B sites (LinkedIn).

What does all this mean? That it’s important to know how to use LinkedIn to market your webinar. But don’t neglect the other social media channels. Using all social media platforms in concert is the best way to increase the odds of your success.

How to Promote a Webinar on LinkedIn

Once you’re done planning your webinar and figured out what it’s going to look like, when you’re going to schedule it, and who it’s going to be for, you’ll want to turn your attention to generating interest in the event and driving attendance.

Naturally, you’ll look to email and social media to be the main drivers of awareness. We’ve written more comprehensively about marketing webinars using social media, but today we’re focusing on LinkedIn.

While LinkedIn is particularly well-suited for the B2B crowd, it’s important to remember that the people on LinkedIn are interested in all sorts of things—not just business. You just need to find the right people to get your webinar in front of.

1. Build Your Target Audience

The first thing you’ll want to do is start building your LinkedIn audience. LinkedIn has some excellent audience targeting features so you can reach the exact people you want. You can filter by industry, years of experience, seniority, locations, age, gender, and a lot more. You can even filter by LinkedIn Group membership.

If you want, you can get really serious about your audience and upload a list of contacts from your own database who match your target audience for your webinar. LinkedIn will use the email addresses from your list to match users on their platform (this usually has a 30%–40% match rate).

You can also build a lookalike audience based on your own database. LinkedIn will find users on their platform who share characteristics with your existing audience and you can target them.

Finally, you can use retargeting to create a LinkedIn audience and target them. This opens up tons of options to include and exclude traffic depending on the actions they take on your website.

2. Generate Buzz About Your Webinar

To get the best attendance possible, you’ll want to start generating buzz about your webinar early. Let your followers know what’s coming and keep them engaged in the conversation. 

You’ll want your promotional content to be high-quality, unique, and distributed consistently throughout the promotional period.  If you’re time-pressed like most marketers, Contentware can generate an entire agency-quality marketing campaign for your webinar in less than 2 mins!

It’s also important to have a landing page so people can register for your webinar (or sign up to be notified once registration goes live).

You’ll want to pull out all of the stops to drive attendance. For example, if you have well-known, respected speakers or presenters for your webinar, you can talk them up! If people know that your webinar is going to get them access to the brainwork of the top thought leaders in the industry, they’re going to be more excited about attending. 

3. Post About Your Webinar on LinkedIn

The best way to promote a webinar on LinkedIn with posts is by creating original content on the same topic and sharing it on the platform with a link to webinar registration. Yes, it takes time to create original content, but if you want to host a successful webinar, you’ve got to do it.

While Contentware produces 100% of the content to promote the webinar, you’ll want to create useful, non-promotional content for your followers regularly (even when you’re not promoting an event). Sharing high-value content is a great way to keep your followers engaged and let them know that you do more than ask them to do things.

On LinkedIn, there are several types of content that perform well:

• Articles or blog posts
• Native video content
• Images, illustrations, and infographics
• Industry news from other thought leaders
• Quick tips

LinkedIn highlights and rewards useful information, so make sure that your content isn’t just promotional. When you create and share content that is educational and entertaining you have a better chance of showing up on LinkedIn Pulse and getting even more attention.

How often you post on LinkedIn should be determined in the context of your overall webinar marketing plan.  We recommend posting on LinkedIn 2-3 times per week as part of a larger plan.  You can mix up the content you post, using long-form articles, images, videos, and more to keep people interested and engaged. Don’t just cut and paste the same old post every day.

In addition to posting content on your business page, you should also post updates on your personal page. And, of course, you’ll want to get others to post original content about your event along with a link to the registration page, too.

You can also create an event on LinkedIn and share posts directly on the event page. We’ll talk about LinkedIn Events soon.

4. Use LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn Groups are a way for professionals to come together to share and discuss a common interest. They’re also a great way to let a lot of people know about your webinar, even if they’re not already part of your network.

However, you shouldn’t just join tons of groups and spam them with details about your webinar. Instead, be intentional and professional. Join groups that are industry-specific and that you have a genuine interest in. From there, you’ll want to participate in discussions within the Group and use it as an opportunity to build and strengthen your network. If you have the right target audience, the topic of your webinar will come up naturally.

As you can probably tell, this is a technique to use over time, not when you’re trying to fill last-minute spots.

5. Ask Your Team to Promote Your Webinar

If you have a team helping you put together your webinar, be sure to leverage those relationships to drive attendance. Ask everyone in your company to promote your webinar on their own profiles. And, if you do have guests speaking or presenting for the webinar, have them share the event with their networks, too.

Even a handful of people sharing and promoting your webinar to their networks on LinkedIn can have a huge impact on the number of people who find out about the event and register.

6. Use Influencer Marketing

If you’re not familiar with influencer marketing, influencers are people with a following in a specific niche. They have authority and knowledge within that niche and can have a huge impact on the purchasing decisions of their followers. Influencers aren’t simply marketing tools but assets that brands can work with to achieve their goals.

You can partner with influencers to promote a webinar on LinkedIn or even invite them to co-host a webinar with you.

If you’ve never worked with influencers, you might be wondering how to find them. Here are a few easy ways:

Keyword Search

Start by coming up with a list of keywords relevant to your industry. Google’s Keyword Planner can be incredibly helpful with this. While you’ll need to sign up for Google Ads in order to access it, you don’t have to run any ads to use it.

Start by entering a few keywords to get started and then you’ll get a list of other relevant keywords.

Now you can search for those keywords on LinkedIn to find the people who have used those keywords. From there, it’s just a matter of checking them out. What do they post about? How many followers do they have? How active are they on LinkedIn? Do they get a lot of engagement?

By the way, if you’re not a fan of Google’s Keyword Planner, but you still want to use this technique, you can use other free SEO tools (Ubersuggest, Ahrefs’ Keyword Generator, or others).

Author Search

Go to LinkedIn and click on the search bar. Search for relevant keywords to get a list of articles and popular posts for that keyword.

Take a look at who the authors are of these posts. These are the people you’ll probably want to reach out to and connect with.

Top Contributors in LinkedIn Groups

Another great way to find influencers on LinkedIn is to check out LinkedIn Groups to find top contributors. You can also check the Popular tab to get a better idea of who regularly posts in the group and is getting good engagement on their content. These are the folks to reach out to and partner with.

7. Use InMail TO PROMOTE A WEBINAR ON LINKEDIN

If you have a small, targeted audience, InMail is a great option for promoting your webinar on LinkedIn. You’ll be able to use LinkedIn’s targeting filters to identify and connect with the LinkedIn users who will be most interested in your webinar content. FYI, if you use LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator, you’ll have even more targeting options.

8. Use the LinkedIn Events Feature

Did you know that LinkedIn has an Events feature? This feature lets you create events on LinkedIn that you can then share with your network both on the platform and off. It’s available for both in-person and virtual events, which makes it a wonderful option for promoting your webinar on LinkedIn. With LinkedIn Events, you can even link to an external site for ticketing if you’re offering a paid webinar.

To create an event, just go to your company page (any admin can create an event) and click on Admin Tools then choose Create an event.

Next, fill in your event details:

Once you’re done creating your event, you can invite your 1st-degree connections to the event.

9. Use Sponsored Updates

Sponsored Updates let you publish content directly to the LinkedIn feed of any user on the platform, not just your followers. To get the most from Sponsored Updates, choose posts that perform well organically. Then, use LinkedIn’s targeting features to choose the right audience.

10. Run Lead Generation Ads on linkedin

The last thing we’re going to cover in this guide to promoting a webinar on LinkedIn is ads. While Sponsored Updates show up in the feed of LinkedIn users, ads show up in the sidebar on the right side of the page. LinkedIn ads can get a bit expensive, so you’ll probably want to start with a test targeting a smaller audience and with a smaller budget.

LinkedIn has lead generation forms that make this process really easy.

Effective ways to promote a Webinar on LinkedIn

As you can see, LinkedIn offers several features you can use to effectively promote a webinar on LinkedIn. The ten tactics we’ve listed here can help you generate more interest in your webinar, increase registrations, and increase registration to attendee conversion for your next webinar.

Contentware uses AI and your webinar landing page to create an entire marketing campaign, unique for your webinar, – in minutes. All you have to do is build the landing page, and Contentware automatically creates the rest. Sign up for a free demo!