A webinar is a chance for a person who visits your blog, sits on your email list, or follows you on social media to learn more about your business. For the host, a webinar is a chance to share your expertise. You can also sell products and services to attendees. In fact, because of the connection you create with attendees, webinars have one of the highest conversion rates of any digital marketing channel.
For the last few years, I have run webinars every month for GetResponse. I want to share my strategy for running webinars that generate leads and make sales. This article will show you how through from finding the right audience to following up and closing sales. It’s a formula you can use to grow your business.
1. Identify Your Ideal Prospects & Consider Their Pain Points
If you want your webinar to be a success, you need to pick a topic of interest to your audience. Start by creating a customer persona. Describe the type of person you want to attend your webinar. Your target audience will normally overlap with your customer base.
For example, imagine you are a photographer who sells an online photography course. The online course is for people who want to take better photos for Instagram. The course is aimed at people between the ages of 18-27 who take photos on their mobile.
I’ve defined the type of person who I think would buy my course. That is my target audience.
When creating my course, I discovered through interviews the two biggest problems people face are:
- Framing photos: many people struggle with how to frame their shots.
- Choosing the right filters: people get confused about what filters to use.
I’ve now identified two possible topics I could cover in my webinar.
You should go through this same process of researching your audience and considering their pain points.
Source: Medium
As a creative professional, you are uniquely placed to know the challenges your customers face, and so you can create valuable webinars to help them solve their issues. That’s important. If you can identify your prospects and their pain points, you can create webinars that appeal directly to them.
If you don’t have a customer persona, create one. Research your ideal client and their needs.
It will define the success of your webinar and if done correctly, then you will be more likely to have a good sleep without nightmares about your work.
2. Choose a Relevant Topic & Create Your Outline
Next, it’s time to choose a relevant topic for your webinar. If you’re struggling to come up with a good idea, you can use Eventbrite as a resource. With thousands of events in each city, you can see what’s being offered locally and nationally.
The best way to find ideas on Eventbrite is to search for events in your niche that are happening in a big city. For example, you could search for events in “New York” about photography.
The nice thing about this approach is that Eventbrite filters events by relevance and popularity. The events that are generating the most interest will slowly climb up the rankings.
When you find an idea you like, click on the link. Review the registration page. Look at the copy they use and see if they share an outline for the class. For example, this class about “iPhone Photography” would probably be relevant for my hypothetical photographer selling an online course for Instagrammers.
Next, you should:
- Create a list of the benefits an attendee would receive from your webinar – this will help people decide if the webinar is right for them.
- The structure of the webinar – break down what you’d cover in the webinar. Most webinars follow a teacher-student format. You could do a discussion, but these are harder to manage.
- Map out the process – how would a person find your webinar. What happens when they sign up, and what do they get at the end of the webinar.
The final step is to consider what day and time you’ll hold your webinar. You’ll find some useful online resources that discuss the best day and time to hold your webinar. I recommend picking a workday. A successful webinar requires a lot of preparation and planning. Achieving success can be tough, but once you get the hang on things it’ll all fall into place – just like using webinar software does for your marketing efforts. You can choose an evening or during the day, depending on if you want to talk to people at work or in their spare time.
Source: Daniel Waas
Next, you need to choose the platform. There are a lot of great webinar platforms. If you’ve never hosted a webinar before, I suggest you read this guide to webinars that covers the basics.
3. Create Your Registration Page
Now that you have a topic, a suitable time, and a date – it’s time to start your webinar marketing strategy. Begin by creating a registration page.
The registration page is where attendees opt-in to your webinar. The page doesn’t need to be complicated, just a simple, clean design that is easy for customers to access on any device. As standard, the page should have:
- A signup form
- Overview of the event
- Itinerary
- What attendees will learn
- Bio of the hosts
Here is an example webinar template from GetResponse; you can see the page isn’t complicated but has all the necessary elements. It’s easy to see where customers register their details, with a call to action above the fold.
If you have no website building experience, don’t worry. Most webinar platforms have a simple page builder. The page builder will usually have a drag and drop interface with predefined elements such as registration forms, images, and text.
Just edit the elements with your information, and you should be all set.
4. Set Up Your Email Registration Sequence
The next thing you should do is create an email sequence for attendees. Through the email sequence, you thank people for registering for your event and then send a couple of emails to people before it occurs. It’s a way of making sure that people who said they would join don’t forget about the event.
The sequence usually looks something like this:
- A welcome email on booking
- A reminder one week before the event to keep it front of mind
- A reminder the day before
- A final reminder about an hour before the event is due to start (to save trawling through emails to find the original link)
Email sequences are very effective. At GetResponse, we use a sequence of three email reminders for our webinars. On our most recent webinar we had 2,068 participants. Of those participants, 63% of the participants came from the first email. A further 22% came from the first reminder, and 15% from the final reminder.
These figures are representative of the trends we observe from our webinar campaigns..
It is vital to strike a balance between reminding and harassing attendees.
Three or four emails in a sequence are fine. People want to be reminded about the event. An email the day before your webinar and one or two reminders on the day of the event is sufficient. For busy creatives especially, these emails are a welcome reminder about an event they were interested in signing up for in the first place.
The email copy for these emails should be straightforward. For example, the email 20 minutes before the webinar might look something like this:
Subject Line: REMINDER: Webinar starting in 20 minutes
Hi NAME,
We’ll be kicking off our “How to take amazing photos at an event” in 20 minutes. Click this link to attend the session.
The class will last for approximately 60 minutes. We recommend you sit somewhere quiet and comfortable. Catch you shortly.
Michal
The email’s purpose is to remind the person about the event and provide them with a link. Don’t spend a long time thinking about your copy.
5. How to Drive Leads To Your Page
I’ve discussed the importance of considering your audience and how to come up with good ideas for your webinar. I then talked about how to prepare the marketing material for your webinar. Now everything is set up.
You have to drive people to your registration page. Getting people to sign up to your webinar is one of the hardest parts of this type of marketing campaign. There are many ways to promote your webinar. Below are a few options.
Cold Prospecting
Cold prospecting involves directly promoting your event to people who might be interested in it, but you have never met. You can do cold prospecting via social media, by email, or phone.
The starting point for a cold prospecting campaign is to create a list of people who might be interested in your service. If you’re offering a business to business service, you could create a list using Google My Business, or LinkedIn. For example, you can search on Google for businesses that fit your customer persona. Then, you could use LinkedIn to connect with relevant people in the company.
You can run cold outreach campaigns in other ways. For example, you might be able to run cold outreach campaigns to people who have attended an exhibition you hosted.
Your cold message should outline the benefits of attending the webinar.
Hi NAME,
Last month you attended a photo exhibition of my work about the Great Lakes, which was held at the Blake Hall. On Monday, at 2 pm, I’ll be hosting a Webinar where I share my top 10 photography tips for capturing a beautiful photo. I hosted one of these events last month. James Milner, a freelance photographer, attended the last event. Here is what he had to say.
“Michal’s class was pure value. I implemented a handful of the strategies he shared and it’s made a big difference to the quality of my photos.”
Here is a link to the registration page – LINK
We normally have 300 people attend each webinar. It’s quite a gathering, and I’m sure you’ll learn a few things. Hope to see you on the webinar!
Michal
Cold prospecting is one way to get people to sign up for your webinar.
Through Your Email List
One of the best sources of leads for a webinar is your email list. By maintaining a clean email list, regularly removing inactive or unengaged subscribers, you can optimize the effectiveness of your webinar campaigns and focus on nurturing genuine leads.
I recommend setting up a short email campaign for your webinar. For instance, you could launch your campaign by giving away a free eBook or resource related to your webinar. If people download the eBook, they are redirected to your webinar registration page. The day after you send the email about the eBook, send a second email announcing the webinar.
In a sequence like this, the eBook helps to build trust and goodwill. It’s a simple way of improving the response rate. Alternatively, you might let people know you’ll be hosting a webinar next week and giving away a prize to one lucky attendee. The next day you share information about the prize and the link to your webinar.
Of course, it doesn’t need to be that complicated. You can just send an email announcing the webinar.
PPC Campaign
Finally, Pay Per Click advertising is another logical way to get people to sign up to your webinar. You can run PPC campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media networks. You can also run ads on Google, which historically worked best for the webinars I’ve run.
The great thing about paid ads is you can scale your advertising campaigns and reach almost anyone. There is a lot of skill involved in running PPC campaigns though. You need to understand things like your Return On Ads Spend, and track conversions. So, PPC won’t be for everyone.
6. Host Your Webinar
With everything else in place, it’s time to host your webinar! As a speaker, I’ve learned that it is essential to know how to present yourself in front of the audience. If the audience gets the wrong impression, they may not make it to the end of the presentation, and you could lose out on potential sales afterward.
Here are some of my top tips on presenting to a webinar audience:
- Introduce yourself and speak about your background (but not for too long!)
- Deliver the promised content
- Read the audience – it is OK to include some jokes but try not to be too informal
- Ask questions and run polls mid-presentation to keep them engaged
- Provide a Q&A session
- Teach them, but have fun!
- Have someone to back you up (especially if you live in an area with unstable Internet connection)
No matter what your webinar subject is, you want it to be engaging and not too severe that it becomes boring. Use your personality to help attendees get to know you and what you are all about; people buy from people they like, so this could get you more sales.
7. Follow Up With Attendees
Following up is a crucial part of webinar marketing strategies. Creatives are generally happy to chat over email, so a follow-up email can differentiate between forging a relationship and losing one. Even if they aren’t looking to purchase from you now, a follow up will keep you in mind when they do. Follow-ups are simple but highly effective, so it is worth putting some thought into this.
Within 24 hours, you should send your follow-up, asking people to take action. They could book a free consultation, or you could ask them further questions about their needs; either way, this is a great way to get feedback and start working on your relationship with these new clients for sales now or further down the line.
The example below is a great example of a follow-up email. The email thanks the recipient for attending, shares links to the presentation, and links to other resources people might find useful.
Source: Yes Insights
Concluding Comments
Creating a webinar marketing strategy to target creatives is a simple way to connect with your ideal customer. Researching their needs and using these insights to create informative webinars provides a fantastic way to become aware of when customers are looking to make purchases.
Put simply; customers will remember companies who helped them. Particularly during COVID, creatives may have more time to put towards learning and development, so now is a great time to start your webinar marketing strategy to nurture some qualified leads for the future with minimal effort!
Bio – Michal is immersed in developing, implementing, and coordinating all manner of content marketing projects as the Content Marketing Manager at GetResponse. He has 8-plus years of expertise in online marketing with a Master of Science Degree in Strategic Marketing and Consulting from the University of Birmingham (UK). Michal is the author of more than 100 articles, ebooks, and courses for both GetResponse and renowned websites like Crazy Egg and Social Media Today.
