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As more and more businesses are going fully digital, it’s more important than ever to create a strong online presence. What better way to do this, than by utilizing webinars in your marketing strategy? They are a great way to engage with current and prospective clients and provide your audience with thoughtful information to prove yourself as a leader in the industry. You may have read one of our past blogs, “How To Use Webinars To Generate Leads For Your Advisory Business,” so I wanted to further elaborate on how to get people to sign up for your webinars.
How Can You Increase Your Webinar Registrations?
Before you can show your audience all of the amazing things that your firm has to offer, you need to get people to sign up.
1. Pick a Relevant Topic
Offer your leads something useful that they can use in day to day life in order to better their business. Pick a topic with a wide enough range to attract a large audience, yet specific enough to that your attendees can begin to utilize it in their business. Stay up to date on what is happening in the news and try to pick a timely and relevant topic.
As we all try to navigate the “new normal” for the time being during the Coronavirus Pandemic, now could be a good time to host a webinar surrounding this topic, such as “How to Market to Your Prospects in the Midst of COVID-19” or “Shifting Your Company to Go Completely Digital.’ Whatever it may be, offer tools, tips, guidance and ideas that they can start utilizing right now.
2. Choose A Certain Day and Time
Wednesdays and Thursdays appear to be the best days to host webinars as that is when most people can attend, so hosting it on these certain days is a way to boost your registration numbers.
Once you have nailed down the day that you want to host your webinar, experiment with times and see what the best outcomes are in order to find out what works for your business.
At Twenty Over Ten, we host our webinars at the end of the month at 3 PM EST as that is what we have found works best for us. Additionally, our “Do It Yourself Live Training Videos” that we host throughout the month is at 11:30 AM EST and our “Learn More About Twenty Over Ten” webinars are hosted at 1 PM EST. This has continued to work for us, but check your responses and analytics and just see how many people attend as you experiment with different time frames.
3. Create a Landing/Registration Page
Before you can start promoting your webinar, you need a place to collect registrations. The webinar registration page example from Twenty Over Ten client, Mark Sharp Retirement. includes all the essential elements of a high converting webinar registration page.
4. Leverage Your Homepage
As probably the most visited page on your website, why not strategically place a call to action or link to register for an upcoming webinar somewhere on your homepage? It’s a great way to show people that your entire company is behind the webinar and really showcases the value for people that land on your site. Though not directly on the Twenty Over Ten website, when you scroll down from the homepage, there is a link to look at all of the “Webinars & Workshops” that we offer. Additionally, a pop up with a CTA to “Register Now” for a webinar that will be taking place this afternoon pops up once the user starts scrolling. This gives visitors the opportunity to register for a webinar that will be going live that day, as well as, checking out other upcoming webinars where they can easily register.
5. Utilize Email
Email is an incredibly powerful tool, as you can reach thousands of people with just one click.
Email drives 57% of webinar registrations.
That is over half, so it’s pertinent that you utilize this properly, because when you have an incredibly budget-friendly tactic that also reaches a very wide audience, it’s best to take advantage of this.
HOW MANY TIMES SHOULD YOU EMAIL PROSPECTS?
We generally host our webinars towards the end of each month and start promoting it generally around two weeks out. It puts the webinar on the radar of our prospects at an appropriate time. From there, we send a reminder the following week, and then finally we send one final reminder on the day of the webinar.
Sending a series of emails to your current contacts about the upcoming webinar is the best way to encourage them to register. You can also incorporate information about your upcoming webinar into your other communications like newsletters. The steps below should help with this.
- Initial invitation – 15 days out from webinar date
- Confirmation – To be sent when someone successfully registers
- Reminder #2 – 8-14 days out from webinar date to those who haven’t registered yet
- Reminder #3 – 1-7 days out from webinar date to those who still haven’t registered
- Final reminder – To be sent the day of your webinar date as a “last chance to register.” We generally send this email an hour before the webinar is going to start, but you can check your analytics and see what time works best for your company.
6. Set a Registration Goal
If you set a goal, then you will be inspired to meet it, so track the analytics of your email service and see if you are on pace to meet this goal. That way you can determine if you need to ramp up your email marketing efforts. Something to keep in mind, however, is that not everyone who registers will be able to attend.
Webinars typically get 36% of pre-registrants to attend the live event.
Many times when people are sending follow-up emails, people use the word “remind’ in there as a lot of people sign up weeks in advance, get busy and forget. So, make sure you staying top of mind as you are seeing out these emails.
7. Utilize Social Media
3.8 billion people use social media, so why not utilize this highly effective tool to promote your webinar? When you are creating your posts, make sure that you are using strong imagery to draw in your audience while also including a registration link with the date and time. If you are utilizing the big three, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, then make sure you are posting on all three platforms.
This can easily reach all of your followers, and if you have a special guest joining you, then make sure you are tagging them, as well. By doing this, they can easily retweet and post to their own followers, which can greatly expand your reach depending on their presence on social.
We generally post a webinar as the above about 4-5 times on your platforms, so slightly higher than the number of times that you send an email. It isn’t going to clutter anyone’s feed, and this is just another way to remind your audience and ensure that you are at the top of their mind as it can be easy to forget when work gets really busy. Also, make sure you pick a dedicated hashtag for your webinar and include it on the landing page, in your emails, and everywhere else you’re promoting it.
WHEN SHOULD YOU USE PAY PER CLICK ADS?
If you haven’t’ quite grown your followers yet, you can consider using paid ads. There are many pros to using PPC (pay per click) ads, such as:
- You will see instant results
- It’s fairly simple to master the campaigns
- It’s easy to scale, as you simply pay more
- It’s buyer-oriented
- You know exactly what you are getting
SHOULD YOU BOOST A POST?
Boosting your social media posts is another great tactic to stand out from the competition. It can really help the number of people that see your post, which is key when so many different brands and companies are on social now. So, how do you do this? You simply pay to have your posts show up as sponsored content on non-followers’ timelines in order to gain more exposure.
8. Invite In A Key Influencer
If you know someone in the industry with a strong background in your topic, then this would be a great time to do a webinar together. This is a great way to show that you are a thought-leader in the industry and surround yourselves with influential people that can provide additional insight to your company and your audience. Additionally, if you invite someone to join you on their webinar, then they are more likely to invite you or someone from your team to share your knowledge with their audience in the future.
For our webinar last month, “How To Convert Website Visitors Into Clients: A Deep Dive Into Automating Processes and Tech With Taylor Schulte CFP®,” I hosted with Taylor Schulte CFP® where he was able to provide so much information to help our listeners convert more visitors into clients. It opens your webinar registration up to an entirely different audience when you bring in a guest, which in turn, will result in more people signing up.
9. Give Your Attendees Something Special
In addition to the wealth of knowledge that you will be providing them, add in something unique that they can use in the future. In our last webinar with Taylor Schulte CFP®, we brought up to our attendees that we will be offering a Lead Pilot trial period from 7 days to 30 days and a 50% discount after that. When it comes to marketing, we are trying to provide as much content as we can for all of you to use.
Even though this wasn’t offered only to attendees, it was easy to find out just by attending the webinar, which otherwise you might not have known about it.
10. Send a Thank You Email and Registration Confirmation
Not only is it a kind gesture to thank someone for signing up, but it allows you to confirm your attendees’ registration, and is just another way to remind them about it. When sending this, make sure that you include a call to action that requires your registrants to take some kind of action. It should be something along the lines of “Add This to Your Calendar,” so that they have it as a reminder with the link to join and they will get an update on their calendar.
11. Make Sure They Know About Upcoming Webinars
You obviously want your audience to attend your next webinar, so make sure they know about your next ones. In addition to having a “Webinars” section on your website where visitors can easily see what is coming next and register, let them know about what is coming up down the pipeline with your company. It’s a good idea to send out “follow up” emails for registrants in case they were not able to attend that includes information and a recording of the webinar in addition to a link or CTA that will tell them details about what they have coming up. If you get it on their radar early, then they can start to plan their busy schedules around this so that they can attend.
STEP 1: IDENTIFY HOT LEADS
This is someone whom you know is actively seeking a solution to solve their problems while also showing interest in your services. When it comes to identifying hot leads from your webinar there are a few key attributes to look for in those that attended your webinar:
- Time spent in the webinar
- Engagement levels
- Responses to survey questions (Pro Tip: Ask attendees DURING the webinar if they are interested in your services)
- Previously attended webinars
- Past marketing touches
STEP 2: FOLLOW-UP #1 (WEEK 1)
After you’ve sent your initial email with the webinar replay (see above) you’ll want to send another email within a week encouraging leads to book a time on your calendar.
STEP 3: FOLLOW-UP #2 (WEEKS 2-4)
If the lead has not yet booked time on your calendar from the previous email your next follow-up email should be a follow-up with relevant content. Why? Checking in a month after the webinar will help deepen the conversation and sharing relevant content from your blog, YouTube channel, etc. will help you stay top of mind.
Taking these steps will show that you truly care about them even before they are a client and are interested in getting them to sign up and learn more. It keeps your business and the webinars at the top of their mind
Final Thoughts
Getting people to sign up for your webinars is half the battle. You have amazing content to share with your audience, but the key is getting them there! Implementing at least a few of these tips can help you grow your webinar audience. We have hosted our fair share of webinars and have implemented these tips over time to grow our webinar attendance over 75% in 12 months. That said, one confession I want to share is that pursuing a webinar strategy has a lot of moving parts. Planning and managing a webinar can be a time-consuming endeavor but they are a fantastic way to scale your content and generate leads.
Related: 3 Reasons Why Your Advisory's Website Isn’t Converting Leads