Webinar Marketing Guide- 7 Strategies and Tips for Success

Like concerts, live webinars are time-based and singular events. Sure, you can have on-demand webinars, but there is something special about attending a live webinar - the excitement leading up to the presentation and the energy between presenter and the audience.

Since live webinars only happen once, planning for promotion of your webinar event is crucial to maximize the value for your business. On average, 85% of registrations occur in the last 2 weeks leading up to the webinar, with 29% registering on the same day.

This means that capturing the other 15% will require you to start marketing your webinar several weeks or more prior to the event.

In this article, we’ll go over the benefits of planning for your webinar and top actionable tips to get you moving forward with your webinar marketing strategy.

Three Benefits of a Webinar Marketing Strategy

The logistics of presenting a webinar involve many moving pieces, so sometimes, planning for marketing is an afterthought. It is especially challenging to make the case for marketing if the webinar was not ideated with the goal of bringing in leads. However, here are reasons why a cohesive webinar marketing strategy is beneficial for all webinars.

1. Identifies Your Target Audience and Ideal Customers

Bringing more registrations is the ultimate goal of promoting webinars. However, creating a webinar marketing strategy can impact the content of the webinar itself!

When you start from the marketing standpoint, your webinar topic will be more naturally relevant as you consider questions such as:

• What are the common pain points of my target audience?
• What questions can I answer in my upcoming webinar that would make the biggest impact on these pain points?
• What webinars have my audience attended that I should keep in mind?

Bridging webinar content with your webinar marketing strategy is one of our favorite webinar best practices.

2. Align Stakeholders and Team Members

Looping in multiple functions of your company to create a detailed marketing plan is a way to bring everyone on the same page.

That way, your team members can work towards a common goal with focus rather than doing their own thing. Additionally, involving team members from various roles will be a great way to overcome challenges and spot potential problems before it’s too late.

3. Encourages Measurable Goal-Setting and Benchmarks

In order to prove value and maintain your webinar program as an essential business function, you’ll need to set benchmarks and goals.

Planning your marketing strategy will help align these objectives with your company’s OKRs to ensure you are tracking and reporting on those important metrics that affect the company’s bottom line. This is especially important to consider if your webinar content is less salesy in nature and more educational, as you’ll be able to attribute your efforts to brand building or retention.

Developing Your Webinar Marketing Plan - 7 Tips

After you have decided on your webinar topic and chosen your ideal webinar platform, here are some next steps to promote your webinar.

Create a Project Roadmap and Set Goals

The best strategies will have a roadmap. Regardless of whether you’re a project manager or not, it’s important to have a clear understanding of your objectives, milestones, deliverables, resources, and planned timeline. Even if you don’t formalize this process, key stakeholders will need to align on these elements.

In your roadmap, be sure to also include your webinar success metrics, webinar software, webinar requirements and deliverables, milestones, and team member roles and responsibilities.

Research and Analyze Your Target Audience’s Activities

You probably have a topic based on what your ideal audience is struggling with. But you might want to do more research to help with your marketing efforts.

For example, if you’re a SaaS product, you can check your customer product data for trends around the most popular features.

ClickUp’s Content Manager, Erica Chappell gives an example: “if we present a marketing-related webinar, we look at ClickUp product data to find customers who use specific features that tell us they're marketers. This allows us to build a targeted list of contacts to invite to our webinars.”

Another example is if you are a content marketing agency, you could show a webinar opt-in form to all visitors to articles about keyword research, content optimization, and rank tracking.

Plan Webinar Marketing Assets

You’ll need webinar assets in order to promote your webinar. Some examples you should consider creating are the webinar landing page, copy and webinar collateral.

A webinar landing page is a web page that’s used to promote your webinar and increase registration. You can find webinar templates on webinar hosting platforms like Livestorm, which allows you to create pages without coding knowledge for free.

You can also use a variety of live presentation templates to create your webinar collateral so you don’t have to start from scratch. When starting out, narrow down your webinar marketing assets to the most essential ones that will help drive webinar registrations.

Determine Your Amplification Strategy

While plenty of guides talk about webinar promotion through social media channels or email lists to gain awareness, one aspect not commonly discussed is amplification: using your own network or others to reach more people.

For example, partnering with an industry expert in your webinar will not only level up your webinar content but also boost the credibility of your brand. If your co-host also shares your webinar to his or her audience, you’ll reach more people and gain more webinar attendees without effort from your end.

Another way to attract engagement to your upcoming webinar is to offer registrants something for free if they share your webinar.

Hosting webinars on a third party platform is another great way to extend your reach, giving you access to attendees from different locations and interests. Webinar marketing tools allow you to target webinar registrants based on demographic or geographic data.

Set Up CRM and List Segmentation

Make sure you are creating custom webinar lists. With list segmentation, you can send webinar follow-up emails or push webinar attendees into other email marketing workflows that are triggered by opting in.

For example, you could set up an email drip campaign for webinar attendees with slices of your webinar topic. Alternatively, you can segment your webinar contact lists to send follow-up emails only to people who have not opened your webinar campaign email or clicked your links.

Plan Post-marketing Efforts and Follow Up

After your webinar, it’s important to send follow-up emails to get feedback and nurture your webinar leads for the sales team. Since the average attendee rate is around 44%, you’ll want to segment your list into those who attended and those who did not.

For webinar attendees, send a webinar post-event survey and ask for feedback. You can also request reviews to your participants after the event, although be mindful that you don’t overdo webinar reviews since attendees are already getting webinar marketing emails from you.

Organize Your Planning with Project Management Tools

The entire webinar management process involves many moving pieces. You’ll need to have a project management system to organize all your work.

Project management software like ClickUp allows you to manage all your webinar planning from one web-based platform. You can organize webinars in your lists, create webinar checklists, tag project stakeholders, and create automations and triggers. Additionally, with ClickUp Forms you can collect feedback and new ideas for future webinars.

ClickUp's Customer Success Lead Sophia Kaminsky who has run multiple enterprise-focused webinars recommends using task templates to easily remap due dates and duplicate the same workflow across multiple webinars.

With additional features like Dashboards to display data analytics and Whiteboards to help create brand collateral, ClickUp is a webinar project management platform you can’t live without.

The Takeaway

Webinars are an inexpensive way to generate leads and increase brand awareness. By planning your webinar promotions, you can amplify the value webinars bring to your business.

With webinar software like Livestorm and project management tools like ClickUp, you can easily set up your webinar marketing strategy and plan.

This article was co-written by Mason Yu, a Sr. SEO Specialist at ClickUp the all-in-one project management software with a mission of saving people time. He has self-hosted marketing webinars for music teachers and is a regular guest speaker at the Juilliard School of Music.