Webinar marketing: Everything you need to know

Did you know that webinars are a key strategy for 99% of marketers?

Their rise in popularity is hard to ignore. They’re popular because webinars are really effective at turning an audience into leads and customers. 

In this blog, we'll explore everything about how to market a webinar you're hosting. We’ll start by covering why webinar marketing is important and then give you step-by-step instructions for building a high-converting webinar marketing plan. By the end, you will have all the information and tools you need to hit your company's goals with confidence.

Let’s dive in!

4 reasons why webinar marketing is important

Marketers love webinars. Here's why they're such a hit:

1. Expand Your Reach: Webinars connect individuals globally, allowing any one person to reach thousands at once. 
2. Increase Brand Awareness: Webinar marketing helps build trust and recognition of your brand. They can be a low-cost way to get your brand in front of more people. 
3. Generate High-Quality Leads: Webinars are great for generating leads. A study showed that 73% of marketing and sales leaders think webinars are among the best ways to get high-quality leads.
4. Establish Expertise: If you give attendees valuable insights and information, you can position your company as a thought leader in your field. Gaining recognition as a thought leader can open up endless opportunities to get in front of new audiences.

Creating a webinar marketing plan

As marketers, it’s really easy to overcomplicate our strategies and plans. But you also can't just send out random webinar invitations. A webinar marketing plan really just has four stages though: pre-webinar, promotion, webinar, and post-webinar. In this section we’ll go over each stage and explain what you need to do to make it successful. 

Pre-webinar

Ever heard the saying 'Plans might be useless, but planning is everything'? That's especially true for webinars. A successful webinar marketing program relies on robust pre-planning activities like:

• Understanding your customers: Knowing your audience is key to creating a webinar that resonates. This means understanding what your audience needs, likes, and struggles with. Consult subject-matter experts like employees or customers. Sitting in on sales calls can also help you understand your customers at a granular level. You can also get data from apps you might already use like Google Analytics, your CRM, or your social media channels.
  
• Understand your goals: What do you want from this webinar? Is it more sales? Is it building an audience? Is it purely informational? Having clear goals will help you target your content to the right people at the right time.
  
• Identify KPIs that matter: If you understand your customers and understand your goals, you should be able to measure your success. Common webinar KPIs marketers use include click-through rates, total registrations, total attendees, and conversions.
  
• Choose the right webinar tools: The right tools can free you up to make important strategic and content decisions to meet your KPIs. The best webinar platforms can make your webinars more engaging and can even impact your conversions. We built Contrast to make webinars more interactive and have a bigger impact on sales. You can learn more about how we do that by checking out our features. 
  
• Recruit Speakers and a Support Team: Pick the right people to present and run the webinar. The different roles during a webinar include organizer/facilitator, presenter, and assistant. Sometimes one person can play every role though.

Webinar promotion

All your preparation work won’t amount to much unless you promote your work to the right audience. Webinar promotion involves a few steps:

• Driving Registrations: A high-converting webinar registration page is crucial for driving sign-ups. A good registration page has several parts working together. A snappy headline sets the tone. A concise and helpful description gives visitors the information they need. Branded visuals help your brand stand out. 

Contrast user Userled created a great webinar page with these elements:

A few things that make this page great include:

• A concise description with bullets that helps you easily consume the information.
• The banner image matches Userled’s branding.
• Speaker information to establish credibility.

We built Contrast so you can easily build compelling and beautiful registration pages. With a few clicks, you can have a snappy description, branded visuals, and speaker information up and running.

Creating Promotional Assets: The ideal forums to promote your webinar depend on your audience. For example, LinkedIn is more likely to attract B2B attendees than TikTok. However, most marketers say email is the most effective promotion platform. Marketers say it converts 27% more than any other channel.

Emails and social media are important for promotion. But they aren't enough. Check out this detailed guide to promoting your webinar for a full list of channels and tactics to use. 

During the webinar

This stage is all about running an incredible webinar. It should live up to, or even exceed, your audience’s expectations. Here’s how to do it.

• Getting Ready for the Webinar: You could host your webinar from a basement with poor lighting and a messy background. But, the best webinar hosts prepare beforehand with rehearsals and dry runs. By setting up cameras, mics, and lighting, you ensure a more engaging experience for attendees. Even with no budget there are a few things you can to do improve your webinar setup and look great on camera. A big part of getting ready is aligning your webinar’s branding with your marketing assets and your company’s brand. Older webinar tools make branding difficult. You’ll want to fully customize the look of your webinar thought. It helps your webinar stand out from the boring video calls that many people are forced to endure all day. 

With a modern webinar platform like Contrast, it's easy to customize all the visual elements in your webinar. You can adjust everything from overall look and feel to specifics like slide layouts, themes, and widgets. 

• Presenting the Webinar: If you have prepared everything, your webinar should go smoothly. By using tools like slide decks, polls, chats, and well-placed calls to action, you can create a webinar that engages and converts.

Polls are one way to create engagement. Asking a question lets people express their thoughts on your topic. In Contrast, you can easily create polls during webinars. Click on the “Polls” button on the right panel to create a poll and watch the results roll in!

You can even overlay the final poll results over the screen so that your audience can see them. We think that EVERY webinar should be compelling, which is why all of our engagement features are included in our free plan. You can create a free account to check them out. 

But polls are just the beginning. Remember to engage with your audience's responses in Q&A sessions and chats as well. Individual questions and chats are also a golden opportunity to harvest ideas for future webinars. People who interact during webinars are more engaged and more likely to convert. Treat them with extra care. 

If possible, it’s great to have a teammate on standby during the webinar. They can highlight audience interaction in the chat that you might miss while hosting.

Post-webinar stage

The goal of your post-webinar activities is to nurture your relationship with your webinar attendees. You want to build a real connection with attendees and continue to provide them with value. It takes effort, but this will help you hit your goals. 

• Nurture Campaigns: Nurturing means engaging your audience with helpful information to guide them in their buyer's journey. You can nurture leads with targeted content, personalization, and timely follow-ups to engage and convert attendees.

Use a mix of content for maximum effect. Emails, social media, website content, videos, and more can all be used for lead nurturing. 

• Repurposing Your Webinar Content: Repurposing your webinar content makes it easy to create more assets for the post-webinar stage. This could mean images, infographics, blog posts, video clips, testimonials or any other format. Repurposing is a way to reuse content to get more life out of it in order to generate new views and leads. With effective repurposing, you can give viewers months of content to keep them in the funnel. After all, we’ve seen that on-demand webinar replays alone create a 36% increase in total views.

With Contrast, you can repurpose your webinar in multiple ways. To start, every webinar automatically turns into an on-demand webinar that can be replayed from the same link so that every registrant has access. We even create chapters to make your webinar replays easier for people to navigate.

You can also use Contrast to edit and share short-form video clips from your content. That gives your team and endless supply of high-quality content to share across other marketing channels like social media and your website. You could even integrate relevant clips into your sales and marketing emails. 

How to measure the success of webinar marketing

How do you measure the success or failure of your webinar effort? Accurate data helps you spot what worked and what didn't in your webinar. Some common KPIs webinar marketers use to measure success include:

• Number of Registrations: This is the number of people who have registered to attend your webinar. It is a good index of the effectiveness of your landing page and promotion plan.
• Source of Webinar Registrations:The analytics in your webinar platform should show how attendees found your webinar. This lets you understand which marketing channels were effective for promoting your webinar. You can also identify gaps in your promotion to improve in the future.
• Registration Page Conversion Rate: This is the ratio of people who have registered vs. the number of people who have visited your registration page. For example, let’s imagine you’re driving a lot of traffic to your registration page but they’re not signing up. That means you’re promoting your webinar to the wrong people or your registration page is not compelling enough.
• Attendance Rate: This measures how many people actually attended your webinar vs registered for it. It's a measure of how good you were at reminding registrants to show up to the webinar. The average attendance rate in the industry is about half.
• Attendee drop-out ratio: This measures how long attendees stay in your webinar. If attendees drop off early, it might show that your content is not engaging or valuable.
• Conversion rate: This is the percentage of attendees who convert to buying your product or service. Every company measures conversions differently. You might even measure conversions across each of your webinars differently depending on what the ultimate goal of the webinar was. It could be anything from a product sign-up to a meeting booked. Your conversion rate shows how effective your webinar was in driving business results.

With Contrast’s free webinar analytics you’ll have a clear view of how your webinars are doing. You can track all of the KPIs mentioned above and will also see what moments people liked and what needs improvement.

The best tool for webinar marketing

There are a lot of webinar platforms to choose from. Many are free. Comparing them all and making a choice can be overwhelming. We’re obviously a little biased, but we think Contrast stands out as the top choice for lively, engaging, and authentic webinars.

It goes above and beyond the basic features that every webinar platform offers. You can create and customize the entire webinar experience. Everything from registration pages to the layout and visuals in your webinar are customizable. A back-end webinar studio even allows you to edit and share clips for content repurposing. Simply put, Contrast was built to help you drive more conversions. 

Key Features:

• Unlimited seats
• Modern chat interface
• Engaging Q&A and poll features
• Custom branding
• Dynamic themes and prebuilt layouts
• On-screen widgets like trending messages and tickers
• Extensive integrations with tools like HubSpot, Zapier, and Make
• Built-in transcripts and editing features to repurpose webinar content for other channels (using AI)
• Rich analytics and reporting 

Conclusion

Webinars offer marketers massive reach paired with high-quality lead generation. By building and executing a webinar marketing strategy with a platform like Contrast, you can engage attendees and drive business goals.