Answers to Your Questions about Promoting Webinars

Producing a webinar is no small investment. Between the hours you’ll spend coordinating the speakers, creating the content, and rehearsing for the live event, a fair amount of time goes into your preparations. With so much skin in the game, you need your promoting webinars activities to generate as many registrations as possible. Every message counts.

In this article, we’ll explore common webinar marketing questions, including how many promotions you should use, an effective webinar marketing cadence, and the relationship between your webinar promotions. 

How Many Webinar Emails and Social Media Posts Should You Include?

Wouldn’t it be great if you sent out one webinar promotion and everyone registered? 

Unfortunately, most people don’t respond to just a single message; it takes many. The best practice for promoting webinars is to market your webinar to all appropriate channels for your audience. Your webinar promotional plan must also be integrated with your organizational marketing calendar, and sometimes, scheduling can be challenging. 

At Contentware, all we think about is event promotion. Using AI and your event registration page only, Contentware creates an entire best practices-based marketing campaign for your event – in minutes. This is our take on the optimal promotional schedule for a webinar with a 4-week promotional period and a “medium” rating in terms of aggressiveness. 

This calendar should be used as a benchmark. Every organization is unique and what may work for one, may not work for another. Of course, that’s why it’s always smart to experiment. Promoting online webinars for free is an advantage that businesses should use in their advantage.

Can You Use the Same Webinar Emails Copy for Each Deployment?

Best practices for promoting webinars include varying your copy with each email, to get as many registrations as possible. Email presents an excellent opportunity to promote different benefits of your business webinar, thereby casting a wider net of interest. 

Specifically, always change your subject lines and opening sentences. If the first message didn’t get opened, changing your subject line provides a new opportunity for the following message to get opened. Similarly, changing the headline or opening sentences may draw in the reader in a way that the previous message didn’t.

Of course, there are elements of your messaging that can be repeated. Features that can stay the same are the “what you will learn bullets” and always make sure the webinar title, date, time, and how to register are prominent in your messages.

Should You Reuse Copy in Your Social Media Promotions?

An essential piece of your marketing plan is social media promotions. Writing copy for a large quantity of social media promotions can feel daunting. It’s tempting to use a few messages and deploy them over and over again.

A word of caution here. If you publish the same content all the time, you miss out on the opportunity to promote a different angle of your webinar. Such as your speakers; why this event is so relevant; key things the audience will learn, etc. For this reason, we don’t recommend reusing 100% of your copy within each channel. Change up your social media webinar promotions! 

Additionally, every social media platform has an algorithm for showing infeed content, as they seek to provide members with content that is most relevant to them. When you run repeated posts or posts that don’t speak to your audience, engagement will suffer. And will negatively impact the algorithms and de-prioritize your content.

The bottom line: create unique posts relevant to the audience you are trying to reach to maximize engagement, distribution, and the overall impact of your webinar promotions.  

Should Promoting Webinars Be the Same Across All Social Media Channels? 

What about replicating the webinar promotion you created for Facebook and running it on Twitter and LinkedIn…okay to do? No. Messaging by social networks varies, and it’s important to “obey” the “rules” of the channel and adjust your “voice” for each.

LinkedIn is professional— keep the tone of your webinar promotion business professional and keep the content concise. Facebook is the opposite— it’s casual, so keep your tone friendly and light. Twitter is a mix of both; short and snappy messages work best. 

Do Email and Social Media Webinar Promotions Need to Be Synced? 

Which webinar promotion should deploy first, the email or social media? And should there be a specific order for posting to the different social media channels? Or does it matter?

A comprehensive webinar marketing plan aims to reach as many viewers as possible on the channels they prefer to engage. Did you catch that last part? The channels THEY prefer to engage with content.

Your audience isn’t going to engage with every single webinar promotion; the email will likely get the strongest response.  Accordingly, plan your webinar emails according to what fits best into your organizational marketing calendar, and then fill in with your social media promotions on either side of the email.

How Should Content Differ Between Social Media and Email Webinar Promotions?

Content voice will naturally vary by channel. Your webinar emails are going to your internal database— a list of people who have some degree of familiarity with your brand. As we mentioned, the email will be one of your best promotion engines and your strongest registration driver.

While webinar email copy should be short, it also needs to be impactful, promoting why your webinar topic is essential, the value of attending (use bullets here), and then an obvious call to action, ex: “Register Now!”

The copy in social media promotions tends to be a shorter webinar promotion than email copy. Keep in mind that social media is very people-oriented and very visual.

Leveraging speaker pictures or an image with the webinar title and date is always a good option. If using bullets from your email, use one bullet per post and develop conversational copy around that bullet for LinkedIn and Facebook especially.

What Are Best Practices for Images in Webinar Promotions?

A big dilemma of webinar promotion— use the same image or change it for every post? 

Because you are trying to create visual recognition with your webinar promotions, there’s no harm in reusing your images. Additionally, this will help create consistency with the live event. But, they need to be acquired legally. 

It’s quite common for marketers to search Google, select an image, integrate it into a webinar promotion, and hit the send button.  The problem is that in many cases, the way the image is used violates copyright law. Try explaining that one to the boss!

Another common webinar marketing mistake is to think citing a source where you found an image makes you copyright compliant. Unfortunately, this practice can still get you in trouble. Always make sure any image used is copyright-free. Some excellent resources include:

• Pexels offers a good selection of professional images, fully searchable and all free.
• Unsplash is another free resource for images, also fully searchable.
• Google includes functionality that allows you to filter the results of an image search by license type— and there are free options.
• Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that works with artists, photographers, and others to make their works available to the public, largely for free.
• Paid services, such as Shutterstock and iStock, cover you legally, and often offer a larger selection as well as higher-quality images.

Final Thoughts— and a Free Giveaway

Business webinars are a great way to build thought leadership, showcase brand authority, and drive lead generation. And, with the right promotional mix, you’ll maximize your impact and net more registrations.

Want more tips on how to market your webinar effectively? Download our free guide, The Ultimate Guide to Webinar Promotions.

Contentware uses AI and your landing page to create an entire, branded marketing campaign – in minutes. Want to learn more, visit our website, or sign up for a demo!