Kick Your Association’s Webinar Promotion Up a Notch
When it comes to your association’s webinars, are you promoting them as successfully as you could be? What can you do to ensure that people actually attend?
Webinars can boost your association’s expert status, build meaningful relationships with your members, and turn non-member attendees into potential members. Hosting a webinar can also help your association reach a larger audience and allow you to leverage your one-time events for perpetual value through on-demand access.
Webinars can boost your association’s expert status, build meaningful relationships, and turn your audience into potential members.
People are busy. Webinar reminders must be frequent and consistent.
Your webinar landing page should be clear and set the expectations up front before a visitor signs up.
The home page of your association’s website is prime real estate for sharing an upcoming webinar.
Regardless of how great you believe your content is, it won’t mean much if there isn’t anyone there to interact with it. So, what can you do to ensure that people who register in advance actually attend and are engaged?
Here are 10 ways you can promote your association’s webinar more effectively:
- Create an informative landing page. This is the first item you should create for your webinar after you have selected a topic that interests your members, booked your speakers and looked to other webinar registration pages for design inspiration. Your webinar landing page should be clear and set the expectations up front before a visitor signs up. This is the home for all of your webinar information that attendees will reference up until the day of the webinar. Check out this example of a landing page for a recent Association Adviser webinar.
- Send a series of emails. After someone signs up for your association’s webinar, send a thank-you email to confirm your attendee’s registration. This not only confirms to them that their submission went through successfully, but also reminds them about your webinar.
Another recommendation for this confirmation email is to include a built-in calendar appointment that lets the registrant “Add to your Outlook calendar now.” Here’s the email automatically sent out after someone registers for an Association Adviser webinar:
Also, don’t forget to send reminder emails to registrants in advance of your webinar. These emails reinforce the value you established with them on your webinar registration landing page. Many of those who registered for your webinar have not only forgotten that they registered, but why they registered in the first place.
It’s imperative to send reminder emails the day before and the day of the webinar. Sometimes we need these emails to create a sense of urgency or induce the fear of missing out (FOMO). Even if some people who initially registered may not be able to attend live, they’ll appreciate the additional reminders. You can even mention that there will be a convenient on-demand recording available for download following the webinar. Be sure to send a follow-up email with the recording details and how the archived webinar can be accessed shortly after the live event airs.
- Add a blurb or graphic onto the home page and additional main pages of your association’s website. The home page of your association’s website is prime real estate for sharing your upcoming webinar. Displaying your association’s webinar on the home page of your website emphasizes that your association is hosting and producing the webinar, and sees the value in it for those individuals who visit your website.
- Cross-promote webinars within your association’s other communications.
It’s likely that your association sends out emails relating to an upcoming event, or a newsletter with the latest information regarding your industry and additional communications. Why not include a short blurb or graphic within those emails about your upcoming webinar? Remember, people don’t know about your webinar if you don’t consistently remind them about it.
Use your association’s blog to promote your webinar. Create a short post about your webinar, the problem it solves, who’s presenting and date/time details. Then, finish with a link to your webinar landing page. After your webinar has ended, you can create a blog post that is a more detailed recap of the webinar with links to download the recording, the slides and a Q&A.
- Share your webinar via social media. Social media is another great outlet for sharing an upcoming webinar. Create a graphic that showcases your topic, include images of your speaker(s) and incorporate a relevant hashtag. Remember to post more than once or twice— share your webinar every few days two to three weeks out, then post every other day the week before, and every day the week of the webinar. Posting often about your webinar on social media is important because social media moves quickly, and you want to ensure it’s top of mind with your followers.
- Create graphics to be used across multiple platforms. Images are important for catching your audience’s attention. You can easily put together an eye-catching graphic for the home page of your website or your social media pages using an image creation tool such as Canva. Include an image or icon that represents the topic of your webinar, your speaker’s photo and title, the title of your webinar, and its date and time.
- Submit your webinar details to a blog relevant to your industry. If you are aware of a blog that is relevant to your industry, the author might be interested in sharing your webinar content. This is a great way to build relationships with individuals interested in your industry; you may be able to encourage the blogger to be a guest speaker for a future webinar.
- Utilize your speakers’ networks. Don’t be afraid to ask your speakers to help promote the webinar in which they’re participating. Your speakers may have a valuable audience that’s different from yours which means greater opportunity to reach your registration goals. Be sure to send them the social media graphics you created to promote your upcoming webinar for your speakers to share on their networks as well.
- Set up a search engine advertising campaign. Budget permitting, it can’t hurt to increase the promotion of your webinar via a Facebook promoted post or Google AdWords ad. Naylor recently ran a paid advertising campaign for the United Motorcoach Association to promote its latest event. Even with a limited budget, UMA was able to reach hundreds of people and achieve a click rate of 2.03% with a Facebook ad. You can apply this same tactic to promote your association’s webinar, even on a limited budget.
- Create a 30-second teaser video. Do you like to watch previews of a movie before you decide to spend $10 to sit through the entire thing? Apply this same concept to your webinars. But instead of a 2-minute teaser video, you can create a 30-second video. Within this video, describe what your webinar will be about, how to register, who your speakers will be, and more. Make your video fun and interesting to encourage your target audience to register and attend live!
Conclusion
Promoting a webinar can seem overwhelming if you are unsure of where to begin. Follow the tips above to guarantee that your webinar is promoted successfully in order to connect with your members, build relationships, and establish industry expertise.
How has your association successfully promoted webinars? Share your insights in the comments below!
Brianna Lawson is an online marketing specialist at Naylor Association Solutions.
