How to fill empty seats during Webinars?

Though their biggest worry about the webinars remains the same. 

• Promotion
• Registration
• Converting registrants into participants on the D-Day.

Promoting a webinar

While it’s a no-brainer to start digital marketing mediums like emailing invites to your contacts and prospects, posting on social media channels, buying ads, etc., though unless an organization has a well-defined digital marketing plan your activities will only create awareness about the webinar and may not result in mass registration for the webinar. (see 9 skills required for today’s digital marketer).

Registration is a critical step and digital promotions alone may not yield a good number.

You need the same efforts as traditional event management activities to drive people to register for a webinar.

What often nudges someone to register for a webinar is the human connection, and this is where the power of your person-to-person relationships comes into the picture, you should reach out to people in your sales, marketing and services organizations to seek their help in driving webinar registration.

Ask your Salespeople to send personal invites to their contacts and prospects to register for the event, if possible, send invites on their behalf through email marketing tools.

A phone call from salespeople to their contacts inviting them to a webinar could have a real impact on driving registration, not to mention it gives them another opportunity to connect with the customer.

It is a good idea to ask your salespeople to leverage their senior customer contacts to influence larger teams in their organization to join the webinar.

Reach out to your channel partners to promote your webinar, you will be surprised to see higher registration and participation. This is true in cases where you have a strong partner network.

Using customer service interactions for promotions, for example, they can put information about the Webinar on their email signature to keep the buzz going about the webinar, more importantly, they can inform customers about the upcoming webinar during their interactions with them. This could also be true for sales and any team directly interacting with customers and prospects.

Most people at work are driven by their calendar and while they may register out of interest or as a courtesy but may not attend if they are not nudged when it’s time to attend.

While this may sound a bit technical but is the most important activity in ensuring that people do attend your webinar.

You can even form special teams to send out the personal calendar invites.

Instead of sending reminder days or a few hours before, it is observed that sending a reminder email just before the start of Webinar works surprisingly well in increasing participation.

Organizing the webinar at a time when most of your target participants cannot attend will result in poor attendance on the D-Day.

Avoid periods of cultural or political events, summer holidays, festivities or times when people are expected to focus on quarterly or year closures.

Selecting a day in a week will decide the fate of your webinar more than anything, Wednesdays or Thursdays are good but depending upon which part of the world your participants are located could be completely different.

Once you have selected the day it is important to organize a webinar when people are expected to have time, and not when they are busy in meetings or finishing their daily work-related tasks. An hour right after the lunch is ideal but could also be 2nd hour after the start of the day.

Avoid days leading or during the big industry events when most people are either busy preparing or attending for those events. It’s generally a good practice to do it just after a major event unless you have reason to do it during or right before the event to disrupt the competitor.

At last, announce webinar dates at least two to four weeks in advance, when their calendars are expected to be free or they can free up time in their calendar. Organizing in weeks’ notice is expected to result in poor acceptance.

While speakers may ask for more time, you should keep in mind that people on average don’t give more than 40 minutes for a webinar. Therefore, ideally, you should never set up a webinar for more than an hour.

The first 5 minutes for the introduction and next 30 minutes for the content of the webinar and the next 15 minutes for participant Q&A if any, leaving the remaining 10 minutes to cover for spillover anywhere else.

Remember Webinars, as a marketing event have a huge disadvantage for organizers and an advantage for attendees, that participants can walk out anytime they would like.

Therefore, in the end, its the content of your webinar that will determine the success of your webinar, but that’s not the topic for this article.

Webinars are been there for more than a decade and not everyone has mastered the art of webinars, they need detailed preparation right from selecting the topics you want to cover, leads you to want to generate, who will speak and what and so on.

Moreover, the world is getting used to working remotely, leading to Webinars becoming an important tool in your overall marketing strategy.
Also published on LinkedIn here