How to Market Webinar Events: 23 Tips for 2023

Webinars are everywhere.

And it makes sense – Zippia reports that a full “83% of U.S. marketers find webinars effective.” They also report that “15% of those who attend a webinar will purchase the product or service” that’s being showcased within the webinar.

With such powerful potential, it’s no wonder that marketers love webinars.

But with the webinar space becoming more and more saturated, a problem emerges…

How do you market your webinar and get it to stand out? How do you keep from getting lost in the sea of voices? What should “Webinar Marketing 2023” look like?

Here we’ll walk you through 23 actionable tips to help you market your webinars—including 1 specific tip that’s so obvious and simple, yet that no one seems to be talking about.

Before we get into the specific tips, let’s dig in a little deeper into the benefits of webinars and why they are effective. After all, the more you understand about webinars, the more effectively you can use them for your business’s benefit.

Why Are Webinars Effective?

Webinars obviously have some powerful potential, according to the stats above.

But why? Why are they so effective?

Demio proposes some helpful reasons as to why webinars work so well. Many of these reasons boil down to:

• Webinars offer the ability to provide good value to your audience
• Webinars allow you to establish authority so that your audience trusts you
• Webinars give you an opportunity for excellent audience engagement

With webinars, you can enjoy some of the benefits of in-person sales in a much broader and more scalable format. You can let people see your face, see that you know what you’re talking about, see that you believe you can help them.

Webinars allow you to spend a long period of time with a focused audience that’s paying attention to what you’re presenting to them—in a format that’s non-intrusive and non-intimidating to that audience. As long as you’re truly providing value in your webinar, your audience won’t mind taking the time because they’re learning something that will help them.

All of this means that your webinar won’t do as well if you use it to hard-sell your product or service. Your webinar should be primarily about giving value that is immediately helpful to your audience, without them needing to part with their money.

Once your audience sees how much value you can provide, they’ll be more likely to shell out their hard-earned cash so that they can benefit even more from what you offer.

Why Webinars Are Important

So we can see webinars are an essential tool for marketing for many businesses.

Why?

Because…

• Webinars are effective, for all of the reasons mentioned above
• Webinars give you the benefit of potentially reaching a large audience in a cost-effective manner
• Webinars give value to your audience (although we already mentioned this, it bears repeating)

For these reasons and more, webinars can be a significant factor in driving more leads – and more sales.

Strategies for How to Market Webinar Events in 2023

So you know why webinars are effective and important.

But the question still remains…

How to market webinar events in the most effective way possible?

After all, you want to get the highest webinar attendance rate that you can.

Here are 23 strategies to help give you some guidance in 2023.

Define Your Target Audience

Before you start marketing your webinar, you need to know who to market it to. You need to figure out your target audience.

Who is your ideal customer? What are their pain points, challenges, and desires?

By defining your target audience, you can create messaging that resonates with them and encourages them to attend your webinar (and, ultimately, purchase your product or service).

But how do you know what your target audience wants, needs, and feels? That’s where the next point comes in…

Understand Your “Voice of Customer”

You could just make an “educated” shot in the dark in regards to how to connect with your target audience.

But, in reality, just throwing your webinar out into the big wide world probably won’t get you very far.

To make the most impact, you need to have a better understanding of your ideal customers. You can gain that by “listening in” and paying attention to their conversations.

The goal is to perk up your ears to what your ideal audience is saying so that you can create a marketing plan that resonates with them and speaks to what they want.

There are several ways you can do this:

• Conduct interviews with a sample of people who represent the type of audience you’re trying to reach
• View recorded sales demos and write down the transcripts, taking note of repeated language, questions, and statements about desires or state of mind
• Pore over survey results for common themes, words, phrases, concerns, questions, emotions, and thought processes
• Go through online reviews of both your product and other similar products (or other products people might use that correspond to the type of product you offer) and look for repeated (or stand-out) language

When you engage in the above practices with an eye to the “voice of the customer,” you can get a good idea for what people are looking for and what will really connect with them.

Understand Your Audience’s Stage of Awareness

Not only should you understand who your audience is and what they want, you should also understand where your audience is in their journey.

How far along are they in the sales funnel?

Are they brand new to the topic of your webinar/product? Are they just “somewhat aware”? Or maybe they’re almost ready to make a purchase?

Knowing your target audience’s stage of awareness will impact how you approach marketing your webinar.

For example, if you’re targeting people who are totally unaware of their need for your product, you’ll present your webinar to them much differently than if they are well familiar with the topic.

Speak to What Your Audience Gets

You’ll go a long way toward connecting with your audience if you speak first and foremost to what they get by paying attention to you.

Don’t talk about yourself (unless absolutely necessary). Don’t talk about what your audience has to do (unless absolutely necessary).

Instead, keep the focus on your audience and the benefits.

This can come out in subtle ways. For example, consider the following 2 statements:

1. “I’ll show you how to shop smarter with 10 little-known shopping hacks that will help you cut your grocery budget in half.”
2. “You’ll enjoy 50% savings on your grocery budget with 10 little-known shopping hacks that will cut your grocery budget in half.”

Though the difference seems minimal, statement #2 is likely to resonate better with audiences. Why?

• Statement #2 keeps the focus on you (the audience) rather than on “I” (the webinar host) by saying “you’ll enjoy” rather than “I’ll show you”
• Statement #2 keeps the focus on what the audience gets (50% savings on their grocery budget) rather than on what they have to do (shop smarter)
• Statement #2 further diminishes an emphasis on the what the audience has to do by stating that it’s the “shopping hacks,” rather than the audience members themselves, that will do the work of cutting their grocery budget in half

Don’t Be Afraid of Specificity

You may be concerned that being too specific will turn people off if the specificity doesn’t apply to them.

Don’t be.

People are drawn to specificity. Specificity is interesting and helps people visualize what you’re saying.

The example mentioned in the “Speak to What Your Audience Gets” point above illustrates the power of specificity: “cut your grocery budget in half” is a good way to present the benefit (as long as it’s true!).

If the benefit was presented as simply “saving money,” it’s not as appealing.

Why? Because “save money” is too vague and broad – How much is the savings? What kind of money are we talking about?

In contrast, “cut your grocery budget in half” is clear. Your audience knows exactly what you’re talking about and exactly the potential of how much money they can save by paying attention to your webinar.

Use AI to Workshop Headlines and Copy

AI is all the rage now in 2023.

While there’s no replacement for real human creativity and experience, AI tools such as ChatGPT can be a tremendous brainstorming tool for marketers.

So you can use AI to help you workshop different headlines and copy to use as you market your webinar.

Note that you shouldn’t use the output that the AI tool gives you unedited—because it will sound robotic, and it doesn’t have the knowledge of your target audience and the experience and expertise that you have.

But AI can be helpful in giving you ideas, and sometimes it’s surprising how high quality the output actually is.

Use Language that Stands Out

If you sound like any other piece of marketing as you promote your webinar, your content is more likely to be ignored.

Use language that’s clear but that also stands out and sounds uniquely you.

That way, you’re not just another voice in the crowd.

This will look different for each business, since everyone has a unique voice, but this is where it can be sometimes helpful to add metaphors and similes and change up the rhythm and pay attention to the tone (you know, all those things you learned about in high school English).

Create a Relevant Landing Page

Keeping in mind your target audience, what they want and need, and all of the other points above, you can put together a landing page that will speak to people, engaging them and convincing them to register for your webinar.

Your landing page should have appealing language explaining the benefit of the webinar for your reader and should include a registration form to collect your attendees’ information.

This page should be attractive, appealing, relevant… and not salesy.

Again, your goal at this point is not to hard-sell your audience but to convince them that this webinar will be beneficial for them.

Consider Using a Framework

Copywriting frameworks give marketers and copywriters a starting point “outline” to write persuasive marketing content.

One common framework is PAS (Problem, Agitation, Solution).

This framework first presents the problem, then “agitates” by elaborating on why that problem really is an issue for the audience, then provides the solution.

Frameworks like these can help give you a tried-and-true formula that is more likely to connect with people.

Use Social Media

Social media holds the potential to be an excellent tool for promoting your webinar.

It allows for free organic posting which, depending on the type of audience you have, may or may not be effective (but at the very least, it doesn’t cost anything). These days it goes without saying that you should include images or videos in your posts to help draw more attention to them.

You can also consider weighing the benefits and costs of paid social ads. For many businesses, paid ads may be the only means for them to get any traction in the current state of their social presence (if they don’t have much organic reach).

Experiment with different social media platforms and types of ads and see if you any gain traction with your audience.

Use Email Marketing

Email marketing to promote your webinar is a no-brainer.

It’s cost-effective and much more reliable than social media.

You can send out an email blast to your email list, inviting them to attend your webinar. Make sure to include a clear call-to-action (CTA) that directs them to your landing page or registration form.

You can also use automated email campaigns to send reminders to attendees before the webinar. (Because, let’s face it—we all need reminders!)

Partner with Influencers

Influencer marketing involves partnering with influencers in your industry who have a large following on social media.

These influencers can help promote your webinar to their audience, which can increase attendance. Or they can even host your webinar for you, or be a co-host or a guest.

Having the presence of a well-known expert (or simply a well-known person) in the field of what you’re discussing has the potential in and of itself to drive more people to your webinar.

Offer an Immediate Incentive for Registering

You can give “double value” to your audience with your webinar by offering an immediate incentive for registering—such as a helpful ebook, a discounted or free item, or some other resource.

This additional incentive could help give people that little added push to registering and providing their email and/or phone number.

Build Anticipation

People enjoy anticipating something.

Knowing that, you can incorporate anticipation marketing into your webinar promotion.

Make a big deal about your webinar topic, emphasizing the value that the webinar will bring. Send emails and other notices building up to the event.

The anticipation will help make people excited to hear what you have to say—as long as it’s something of value.

Test, Test, Test!

You may follow all of the best marketing tips, but there’s always the possibility that they will fall flat for your particular audience.

Ultimately, what really matters is what your audience actually responds to.

In order to discover that, you have to test different approaches and see what’s the most effective.

So don’t be afraid of failure! Try things and see what works and what doesn’t. If something doesn’t work, you’ve still won because you’ve learned something about your audience.

Misc. Tips

Depending on your circumstances, some of the following tips may be helpful as well as you go about marketing your webinar:

• Use paid search engine ads (Google, YouTube, Microsoft)
• Use other media at your disposal (for example: podcasts, or fliers with a QR code leading to the registration link)
• Use banners and pop-ups on your website
• Use a guest opportunity on another business’s blog, podcast, or webinar
• Incentivize your current audience to promote your webinar so that you can get some positive word-of-mouth
• Reach out to previous webinar attendees
• Bring emotion and logic together in your messaging

The 1 Webinar Marketing Tool No One’s Talking About: SMS Reminders

Now we get to the #1 under-utilized tip for how to market webinar events.

Send SMS reminders.

Yes, texting—it’s a simple yet immensely powerful tool that many are starting to use for promoting their webinars but that no one seems to be talking about.

To put things in perspective, texting has insane read rates of up to 98%.

98%! Imagine how excited you’d be if your emails had that high of a read rate.

So let’s go over some in’s and out’s regarding how you can use the power SMS to market your webinar.

How Can I Use Texting to Market Webinar Events?

The primary way that people and businesses (such as Neil Patel) use SMS to help market their webinars is by sending text reminders reminding people to attend.

A simple SMS nudge can do a lot to help drive better attendance for your webinar. Your text reminder can even include a link directly to your webinar, so then the flow can look as simple as this…

• Your recipient sees the text reminder, say, 5 minutes before the webinar begins.
• Your recipient finishes up whatever they’re in the middle of doing.
• Your recipient goes back to the text and taps the link to join the webinar.

So the concept is really pretty simple.

Let’s go over a few more details about how it works.

Use a Reliable SMS Platform

To use SMS reminders, you need to use a reliable SMS platform.

SMS platforms such as Mobile Text Alerts allow you to manage a database of contacts and send out individual or mass messages.

You can schedule and automate these messages ahead of time, so that when the time for your webinar approaches, you can just sit back while the reminder texts go out, drawing in those extra attendees you’re looking for.

(If you host webinars using GoToWebinar or Zoom, you can actually integrate directly with the Mobile Text Alerts platform so that all of your registrants will automatically sync into your texting database and receive reminder texts.)

Set Up the SMS Message You’d Like to Send

You can pre-set the reminder messages you’d like to send from within your SMS platform.

You can schedule as many reminder texts as you’d like—for example, you could send a reminder text 60 minutes before the webinar and then again 5 minutes before the webinar.

Your reminder texts will then go out as you designate.

Here are a couple of tips to help you know what content to include in your text reminders…

Keep Them Short and Clear

SMS in general should be short—you should keep it under 160 characters if possible.

(But don’t stress out about it if you find it difficult to keep it that short. Although the shorter length is preferred and it uses up fewer messaging credits in your SMS platform, it’s not required.)

You can use the reminder text to help them remember what benefit they’ll get from the webinar, what time the webinar is, and the link they can use to join.

Personalize the Reminders

It’s commonly known that people engage better with personalized messaging.

One simple way to help personalize your reminder texts is to include your recipient’s first name in the text message.

SMS platforms can do this for you automatically, just like email marketing platforms can.

“

Hey Roger! Get ready to discover how to get 50% savings on your monthly grocery bill! Webinar starts in 1 hour. Link to join: [link]

“

Jane, we’re live in 5! Your grocery savings webinar will begin in 5 minutes! Click here to join: [link]

Collect Attendees' Phone Numbers

Of course, if you want to send reminder texts to registrants, you’ll need to collect their phone numbers when they register for your webinar.

We’d recommend making the phone number an optional rather than required field on your registration form.

Another benefit of asking for your registrant’s phone number is that you’ll have another means of marketing to the customer after your webinar is over.

Did your registrant end up not attending? You’ll be able to send them the link to the replay.

Did your registrant attend but didn’t end up purchasing? You can send a follow-up asking if they were interested or have any questions.

You can then have your sales team determine if this is a lead that would be beneficial for them to pursue further follow-ups with.

Get More Traffic to Your Webinar… (and Therefore, More Sales!)

Marketing a webinar can be challenging, but using the right strategies can…

• Increase attendance
• Improve conversion rates
• Get you more sales!

SMS reminders in particular can be a powerful tool to help get more attendance for a webinar.

Get a free trial to test out SMS marketing for yourself as you market your webinars.

And happy marketing!