How to increase your webinar attendance this 2020
Webinars are not new as a marketing strategy, in fact before COVID-19 arose webinars were already in the field particularly in the business industry. But through time and as technology develops, online webinars are quickly becoming more essential means for all industries.
But why is this so? What do webinars do? Business experts know that their business operations cannot be limited to physical set-ups only and that’s where webinars come to help. With webinars as a marketing tool, companies can keep up with their customers, sponsors, and fellow accomplices from wherever across the world.
Webinars are also a great source of prospects that can eventually be turned into paying clients. With all the impressive benefits a business can take advantage of webinars, companies don’t need more effort to achieve a successful business outcome.
These are all just some of the benefits of webinars to the business industry. As you delve deeper into this article, you will find out more details about webinars. At long last, you will discover how companies and businesses improve their overall performance utilizing webinars. Steps and strategies are also provided in case you’re being enticed to make your webinar.
Why are webinars and other virtual events important?
The developing significance of webinars can’t simply be ignored at this point. Particularly, new companies and private ventures have a chance to support efficiency, save money, and improve coordinated effort by utilizing these webinars.
Innovation is progressing exceptionally fast and is expanding its capability of affecting companies in manners that occasionally appear to be very incomprehensible. The utilization of webinars is one such potential that can significantly assist companies with upgrading their business measures and return to their techniques to be more proficient. But these are all understatements. Below are the specific reasons why we need Webinars.
They allow us to be human
As increasingly more work goes distant, the requirement for human connection is higher, and it can be challenging for all. That is the place where webinars can give a necessary outlet to ‘network’ without putting yourself in danger, webinars offer a more formal and personal approach to connect with clients and engage your audience.
They allow brands to pivot
As business people are continuously searching for ways to maintain their business, many of them are turning into digital events such as webinars. The webinar provides an impressive way to pivot to continue business ventures.
They can build and develop and demonstrate expertise
While you host a webinar for training and tutorial, you provide your audience with the necessary information they need and at the same time, you also build your experience.
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They can serve as another leg of inbound marketing.
Webinars are a great marketing tool that helps with generating more leads by making the audience sign-up for the event.
They can build consistency and trust.
As you host countless significant webinars, your audience will see you as an expert in your field. This will cause your audience to build trust and value you as a host. This will also make your events even more interesting to stream.
These are just some of the reasons why webinars are more becoming popular and significant in the business industry.
Benefits of webinar
Webinars empower you to use surveys, polls, private chat-room calls to action or present your audience with PowerPoint slides or video recordings, and other digital content. The more intuitive and interactive your webinar is, the more noteworthy the effect of your message will be.
Financially savvy
Physical marketing events include traveling and cost time and money; however, webinars kill the need to travel. Make it simpler and less expensive for your audience to join and be engaged by your webinar event.
Produce new leads
Webinars are excellent for setting up yourself as a thought leader. Instructing and preparing participants on your products and services featuring your experience and skill, building relationships with the audience, promoting your brand image, and more.
Subsequently, if you make a convincing course, you can spur members to join your email list, move them through your sales funnel, and convert them into paying clients and brand advocates. Eventually, webinars offer a profoundly viable strategy for developing your list at a lower cost for every lead.
Webinars are User-friendly
You don’t need to be an IT enthusiast to know how web-conferencing technology works, nor your audience requires technical skills to sign up and join a webinar. Webinar platforms have just gotten faster, more reliable, and less inconvenient in the most recent couple of years, so it truly is a win-win situation both for the audience and the host.
Increase market reach
You aren’t restricted by location, which implies you have a chance to develop your business faster by expanding your reach across the globe. The audience who wouldn’t have had the option to go to an in-person event will likewise feel included and conscious of a similar experience as every other person.
How do you increase your attendance?
Utilize emails to get registration
Hosting webinars can ensure a great lead for your business. However, assembling a decent webinar requires not just good material but also efforts in creating webinar marketing strategies. You should take a shot at decent email methodologies that will help to target the right audience and get them to register for your webinar event.
Send promotions
Begin sending your webinar invitations fourteen days ahead of time. They do not just work to remind registrants about the event’s date and time, they also rebuild the worth that you established with them on your registration page. This also gives you the ideal chance to catch participants during the setting up period of your event.
Normally, you should send three to four webinar invitations to your target audience. Ensure each email is unique to the next. Refine your email format as regularly as possible by addressing the recipient’s name and having the included speaker sign off.
Finally, provide last-minute email reminders preferably one day before the event to refresh the minds of your participants regarding your big event. You should not give up on those people who opened your emails but did not register, stun them with email reminders and make them your webinar attendees.
Personalize your email
Disregard email formats. Address the recipient by their name and cause them to feel like a companion. Avoid using email templates and make them on a more customized level by closing down with your name rather than a nonexclusive organization name. By keeping your email in a more personal format, you are imparting a feeling of trust.
Bear in mind that personalization isn’t just about customizing your email format and content, you should also be familiar with your audience and know what type of emails they ought to receive from you. This is a complicated job especially if you’re reaching people of different industries and different time zones for the same webinar event. In this degree, you should work on the part on how you can address and differentiate between customers, prospects, and more.
Test your emails
It is necessary to test and check all things about your email before sending it to your recipients. Establish some hypotheses and run some tests that can make email even better. As you perform this strategy, it will become clear which part of your plan works and doesn’t work for you. Maintaining this practice will likely guarantee you near a hundred percent great event outcome.
Use Social Media
The awesome thing about social media is that there’s a good chance that your audience is connected with you socially, as well. That manages you the chance to utilize social media platforms to remind your audience about your big webinar event.
Hashtag
Hashtags are a great way to double the engagement for your webinar. This is why you should consider creating industry-relevant hashtags. You should also be aware and cautious with the hashtags you use since more hashtags and irrelevant hashtags could negatively affect the audience’s engagement.
Scheduling posts
In case you’re using a social media publishing schedule, you can create more urging updates for each social media channel that remind your audience you have a forthcoming webinar event. Increase the number of updates as the date draws near, particularly the day preceding and the day of the said event. Make sure you choose a relevant hashtag for your webinar and post it on your emails, registration landing page, and everywhere else you are promoting it.
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Take advantage of your previous webinars
Get a chance to promote your future webinars during your presentation. Make a short survey for your audience and let them throw suggestions about their preferred topic for the next event, in this manner, your audience will feel valued and will keep them in touch with your future events.
CTA for the Next Event
A standard CTA on your site can draw attraction, yet pop up CTA can surely catch their interest while likewise making a sense of urgency and newness to the webinar offer.
Your ideal CTA should
- Be compelling enough to draw more audience
- Convert possible prospects into participants
- Maintain a low cost for high conversion rates
Content Centers
Notwithstanding making some blog CTAs, why not compose a promotional blog article committed explicitly to promoting your webinar event? Like a landing page, ensure you incorporate all details and reasons why people ought to join in.
Take advantage of social media and publish your blog, have it to your subscribers to increase the number of participants joining in your webinar event.
Nurture with Webinars
Provide your audience with a branded experience by nurturing them with your best evergreen webinar series. Combine all your best webinar presentations and make it a “mini-webinar series” for study guide and lesson plan.
Convert your registrants to attendees
Marketing is a major inbound strategy for all businesses. The number of assets, amount of time, and money you spend in making a webinar event can positively affect its success. Be that as it may, hosting a substantial webinar is just the initial step. You have to catch up with a robust post-webinar marketing strategy if you want to convert your leads into paying clients.
Work with your reminder emails
Working with reminder emails is a great opportunity to make further announcements and details about your webinar to augment the number of sign-ups. People might forget your webinar and might forget why they sign-up in the first place, this is why you should stun them with emails with different reminders and must be sent at different times. Preferably, it must be sent 2 weeks before, the day before, the day of the said event, and perhaps 1 hr after the event ends.
Personalized vs Generic Reminders
There are two formats of emails that you can use in sending reminder emails, it might be Personalized emails which are typically sent by the speaker to registrants, or Generic reminder emails which are standard and straight to the point emails. You can use personalized emails to half of the audience and Generic emails to the rest.
Use incentives to get attendance
Prizes in some cases can turn a tentative webinar appointment into a confirmed one. Choose prizes that give an advantage to your audience. Try to provide books that are related to the webinar topic and let your audience know that they can enjoy exclusive freebies in joining your event. It might be sets of e-books or special reports and additional important information that can’t be accessed by those who didn’t join.
Play with your Webinar Dates
Mondays and Fridays consistently appear to get topped off with “catch up” and “last-minute emergency crisis” happenings around the workplace. That leaves Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays which according to a study are the best days to host a webinar. In time issues, like any other variable of your webinar depends on your audience. You have to include surveys on your emails or perhaps on your landing page to help you tweak the date and time.
Conclusion
Webinars can be beneficial in a multitude of ways, that’s why it is not surprisingly becoming more popular for companies to utilize. More importantly, the advantages of facilitating a webinar are essentially limitless. There might be a lot of work to do to achieve a successful webinar but believe it or not it’s all worth it in the end. The tips above will help you with taking advantage of webinar hosting, so feel free to make your stage for your webinar!