You’ve got a fantastic webinar lined up for the upcoming weeks: Industry veterans are coming together to speak on a highly anticipated topic, and you can't wait to pop a bottle of champagne to celebrate its success.
But more often than not, you end up getting disheartened as you promote it and see low registration counts. Or worse, you see your registrations skyrocketing, but when it comes to actual attendance rates, they’re quite abysmal.
Our webinar, The Secret Sauce to Successful Webinar Promotions, brings together two industry-leading experts, Jessica Connolly (Director of Events, Hubilo) and Taryn Pacheco (Head of Growth, Hubilo), who discuss what it takes to drive webinar attendance. To watch the full on demand session and playback click here.
Studies suggest that 85% of the marketers who have webinars in their marketing mix consider them an essential part of their strategy. However, with growing competition, it isn't easy to attract audience attention and get them to register for your webinar. Even if you get your audience to register, getting them to show up is the next challenge.
Our Head of Growth, Taryn, says, "Registrations are just as powerful as attendance. Surveys have shown that of all the registrations you have, only 40-50% of them are expected to actually show up. If you have 50 registrants, that means you have 25 attendees versus if you focus on registrations and get up to 200, you have 100 people joining you, and that's 4x growth."
Here are four things you can do for your webinar promotion strategy:
Although it depends on multiple factors like your goals and the scale of the webinar, typically, a webinar should have a 2-3 week promotion cadence. Statistics show that 17% (nearly half of your attendees) sign up more than 15 days before the big day.
Download Hubilo's Webinar Success Blueprint to get our Essential Planning Checklist for Winning Events
The general rule suggests that people take weeks to sign up for a webinar, and it's the people who sign up at the end who actually show up. Taryn says, "The registration graph is not equal throughout the cycle. While there could be 100 registrations initially, it could decrease to 60 next week and increase to 110 by the end of the promotional cycle. This is where I think marketers should give themselves grace. Experiment and test new things, like the duration of promotions, time to send out emails, week of the day that delivers best results for you, and much more."
Your webinar is as good as your ability to get people to attend it. Incentives are the cherry on top of your webinar sundae — it could be something as simple as a coffee voucher or a fun branded gift. The key is to deliver a webinar experience that keeps your brand at the top of your prospects’ and clients’ minds. Creating a memorable experience for your attendees goes a long way in advocating for your customer experience.
UTM links are the most effective ways to track your success and make your promotions effective. You need to track what's working and what's not; UTMs will provide insight into which partners are generating the most registrations for you, which ad placements are driving sign-ups, and most importantly, which promotion channels to optimize your strategy for next time round.
Taryn shares three tidbits when it comes to using UTMs (which she calls the sexiest things there 😉):
At least 57% of marketers host 50 or more webinars per year as part of their demand generation strategy. This increases the challenges for brands to stand out when it comes to webinar planning and execution. If you want to find out what's this secret sauce, explore our exclusive webinar and take a deeper look at what it takes to boost your chances at success.
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