Overview
Are you struggling to get attendees to your webinars? Do you know what you should do to capitalize on their engagement after the webinar? Fear not, we have four tips to improve every step of your webinar program and make sure it’s successful!
#1 – Select Strong Speakers and Topics
Focusing on securing strong speakers and topics may seem like a no brainer, but it’s the most important part of the process and often overlooked.
To start, make sure your topics are relevant to your audience and the roles they are currently in and may want to be a part of in the future. You could look for speakers that are industry experts with a compelling take or your well-known customers with a unique use case. This helps to make sure your audience feels the urgency of signing up and attending. A little bit of FOMO never hurt anyone, right?
You could also look at your company’s data to influence your webinar topics. What is your most downloaded web content? What is your top selling product? These are great opportunities to expand on the type of content you have available and increase engagement where there is already a known interest.
#2 – Use a Multi-Channel Approach for Promotion
Once you have a great topic lined up, the next step is making sure your promotional plan is laid out and started early enough to have the maximum success.
You should start your webinar promotion at least four weeks out so you can maximize your channels and get the most registrations. In order for this to happen, work with your marketing team to submit their request at least six weeks out to allow the MOPs team time to build out any campaigns and necessary integrations.
Once the registration page is live, plan to promote the webinar across all of your channels including email, website banners, social media posts, partner marketing and sales outreach. People often rely on email for webinar promotion, but then you’re only contacting people who know your company. By broadening your reach to other channels will help you acquire new names.
Finally, you should consider how to optimize your reminder emails, so once someone registers they actually attend the webinar. This is a great opportunity to test different approaches including how many reminder emails you send and the cadence they are sent.
#3 – Leverage Your Webinar Data
You’ve promoted your webinar and had great attendance, but now we need to talk about how to leverage all of this great data you’ve collected leading up to and as a part of the event. There is the typical registration data you receive from your webinar provider – name, email, and company – but there is more data from attendee’s webinar engagement you can use, too.
You can glean insights from the below data to help influence your next steps:
- Questions asked
- Comments in the chat
- Poll answers
- Active listening
- Survey answers
You can use this data to personalize your follow-up plan, plan your next webinar and use it for data enrichment. There is a treasure trove of data shared during a webinar so don’t let your webinar go by without capturing it!
#4 – Optimize Your Follow-up Plan
The final tip for more successful webinars is optimize your follow-up plan. You’ve had people attend and now you need to make sure you’re continuing to nurture their interest.
As we mentioned above, leverage the webinar data to inform your follow-up emails. You can tap into the Q&A questions to determine where there may be areas of additional interest and provide articles, videos or other valuable content.
You should think through a 2-3 week timeline based on the content you provide to continue educating your webinar attendees on the topic, in addition to sending the recording. If the content you’re promoting is already in a nurture campaign, you could also add them into that campaign.
Here is an example of a webinar follow-up timeline and some of the content types you could provide to keep educating your audience.
Conclusion
There are many different ways you can improve your webinars and make them more successful. Be sure to leverage the data you have to influence your speakers and topics all the way through your webinar follow-up. Take the time to think about your promotional plan and follow-up plan to ensure you are doing everything you can to get attendees and then follow through after the event. With these key tips in hand, you’ll be ready to launch your most successful webinar yet!
