Webinar Marketing Plan

Establishing a template for your marketing strategy will help you create a streamlined and consistent workflow for your webinar. If you are interested in a general webinar planning guide please check out our Best Webinar Planning Template blog post. The purpose of this is to provide you with some tips and tricks to keep top of mind when working on your webinar marketing strategy. 

Define your Target Audience 

Determine who your ideal attendees are, their pain points, and how you can solve them. Once you nail this down, it will allow you to figure out the tone, format, and where to focus your marketing attention. If you are still determining who that might be. Collect some data by performing some polling and feedback requests. Engaging with your community by asking specific questions will help peel back the layers of what you are trying to accomplish. 

Choose a Relevant Webinar Topic 

Select a topic that resonates with your target audience. Ensure that you are providing a solution to the problem. Be specific with the topic and stay away from generic topics. For example, “Producing Great Webinars” is a broad topic to have a meaningful conversation within a 1-hour webinar. It is best to find out what specific elements the greater audience has issues with that topic. If you narrow it down to “Finding Engaging Guest Speakers for your Webinar” it will allow you to have deep, meaningful conversations and provide a specific solution for your audience.

Create a Landing Page

Your webinar marketing plan needs to have a landing page for your prospects. A centralized and shareable webinar landing page that doesn’t overwhelm your audience. It needs to create excitement for your webinar attendees with an engaging topic and robust deliverables. Suppose you aim to perform other webinars, which you should. Create a virtual events page that will house all your previous webinars and any upcoming webinars. Having a centralized location for your webinar content is a way to keep your past events available as evergreen content.

• A catchy title of the webinar. We have a great write-up on Webinar titles
• A short description that uses active words to drive action and motivation. Indicate the benefits it will pass on to the audience.
• The date and time of your webinar
• Additional information (guest list, agenda, multimedia, etc.)
• Set up your landing page for sharing across social media (ie, LinkedIn, Facebook). 

Webinar Registration Page

Before we move over to marketing communication and lead generation, we want to address some pro tips regarding your registration page. 

• Keep the design short and sweet. Having too many fields can lead to a drop-off in the registration funnel. Ideally, you want to have between 3 to 5 fields. Any more can lead to an increase in drop-off.
• Use a single-column form layout; this creates an ideal optical flow that keeps the prospect focused. 
• Be mindful of mobile users. Keep your form fields and buttons roughly the size of a finger (44x44 pixels). Offer drop-down fields and keep your font choice to something easy to read. 

Promote 

Time to gather your marketing team and put together your marketing campaign. Solidifying a specific process and elements that need to be addressed helps prevent things from falling through the cracks. Effectively utilizing webinars as a lead generation source should not be ignored. Here are some key elements you should consider for your next webinar.

Your Website

Your website is an easy-to-find location to house and notify visitors of your online events. Your upcoming webinar must be visible on your website. Key elements you should consider include. 

• A call to action (CTA) banner indicating your upcoming webinar
• A blog post of your upcoming webinar and recaps of previous webinars
• A repository for any on-demand webinars recordings

Email Marketing

Reach out to your email list and encourage them to sign up for the webinar. You can also use email invitations to reach potential attendees who still need to sign up. Most importantly, establish an email cadence timeline. Life is busy and it is easy for a webinar sign-up to get lost in the weeds. Finding a balance between too much and too little will help mitigate unsubscribe rates and encourage attendance.

The template should look like this:

• Post-registration follow-up confirmation email
• First reminder: Sent 1 week from the webinar
• Second reminder: Sent 1 day before the webinar
• Third reminder: Sent 1 hour before the webinar
• On-the-fence reminder: Send your final promotional email on the day of the webinar to people who've opened previous emails but did not register
• First follow-up: "Here's your recording!"
• Second follow-up: "Additional resources"
• Third follow-up: "Future events"

Leverage Social Media

Share the webinar on social media platforms and use hashtags to reach a wider audience. Don’t be afraid to experiment with alternate social media sources and communities. You may have a primary platform you communicate with, but alternate platforms such as Youtube or TikTok have potential prospects hungry for your content. You may need multiple posts and iterations on these alternative platforms to determine what works best for that audience.

When generating your social media post, keep these top of your mind

• Adjust your post format to best serves the platform you are posting on
• Include visuals, either an eye-catching image or a teaser video. 
• Provide a clear Call to Action
• Consider targeted Ad campaigns

Partnerships

Why do this on your own when you can bring a squad? Think about co-hosting a webinar with relevant influencers and figureheads with similar goals. Leveraging each other's contact lists and communities can boost registration numbers. Be sure to set expectations for both parties, such as post-event data, recorded content, or even when communication posts on social media. Getting your ducks in a row will reduce surprises and maximize each other's efforts. We have a deeper dive into this topic “Why Partner Marketing is Critical During Economic Uncertainty” 

Incentives

Consider offering incentives to encourage sign-ups. A little carrot to dangle, such as a coffee gift card. Understandably this does add your costs to host, but it can be the difference for those teetering on the line. Let us not forget you can offer other incentives like discounts and white papers.

The Follow Up

After the webinar, follow up with attendees to thank them for their time and ask for feedback. Think about offering post-event content, such as the on-demand event recording. You can also offer some curated short-form content of the most insightful moments. The extra effort in your post-event content can translate into a value add for those attendees and encourage them to attend more upcoming events.