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How To Get More Webinar Viewers
You have the perfect idea of what you want to teach your audience, what they would find so much value from, and the perfect slides all set up and detailed out with your brand colors, your brand voice.
But what do you do if no one shows up? This post is going to be all about making sure you have enough webinar viewers. So let’s dive right on into how you can get more webinar viewers.
Why Are Webinars Important
When building a company, it’s really about being in company with other people. You can’t have a company if you don’t have a company of people. That’s why webinars work really well for businesses because you’re creating a space that feels like you’re in great company with like-minded people. If you’ve never tried a webinar before, I 100% endorse them completely. It is something that we’ve seen build a really strong community at MeetEdgar, and not only the webinars that we run for our users and our community, but also those that we run in order to get brand awareness and sales up. Whatever it is, it creates a connection with people that text-based content doesn’t get because you can’t get the tone when it comes to actually having just text. If you have the text there, you’re not actually sure how someone is actually delivering that text.
If someone’s heard you speak before when they’re actually reading your status updates, it’s much more likely that they’ll be able to recognize your brand voice. They’ll have a face to put to the name and they’ll know your company that much better.
Facts Tell but Stories Sell
Remember that facts tell but stories sell. If you’re writing status updates that are just strictly about the facts and about the kind of nuts and bolts on what you’re going to teach and you’re not telling personal stories within that, it’s going to be a lot harder for your followers to connect with that vibe.
Think about the ways when you’re writing your status updates. You can get some personal stories in there, whether it’s some behind the scenes content about how you actually created this webinar or a story about how something within the webinar has helped in your personal life. Tell stories about your real-life or tell stories about your customers, using user-generated content around the transformations that they’ve seen by using the knowledge that you’re going to provide in that webinar.
Make sure that you’re of course presenting the facts to tease people into what they’re going to learn and to pique their curiosity, but also make sure that it’s done in a story fashion because this is what’s going to actually convince people to convert and register for your webinar. Remember, when you’re writing your posts, people are not buying a webinar. They’re buying the hopes of transformation. We’re buying is the hope of transformation to solve a pain point, to make our lives easier, to educate us, and to entertain us. So think about the ways your status updates promoting your webinar can prove to people that by attending they’re going to go through a transformation.
Do Napkin Math
If you have a clear goal in mind ahead of time and have this vision set for what you need to do, it’s going to be so much easier to walk backward and know how many registrants you need and know how many ads you have to put money behind versus how many organic posts you’re getting out there.
You don’t have to be a math person to do this! We promise! It’s typically said about 25% of registrants actually show up live to a webinar. So, of course, you want to send out your replays to reach other people who couldn’t make it live, but you want to make sure that you’re getting enough registered stuff so you have a good amount of people live there. Say you want to have about 800 attendees live on a webinar, you’ll need to get about 3,200 people to sign up and register to make sure you have 800 who actually show up. So having these targets in mind, again, not only help you make sure you know how often you have to be getting the word out about this. But also it can help you know how much ad spend you’re going to need when promoting your webinar. So remember that, 25% of the registrants will actually show up live and do the math that way.
Give Yourself Plenty of Time
You want to have this preparation done about two weeks ahead of time, you want to start teasing and promoting your webinar. If you’re promoting it just the day of, it’s not going to get enough people there and it’s not going to get people to actually come live typically because they haven’t planned it out, if you’re just doing it the day. So plant the seeds ahead of time to get that harvest of registrations for your webinars. We recommend two weeks out.
You can also start pushing pre-sale, even a month out, by asking your community what they want to learn in your webinar. Pre-sell it in this way that you can get people knowing what you’re working on it, tease it out, get it in their head, prime them a little bit to get excited about it. But two weeks out, start pushing hard on the posts you’re actually putting out there.
Take the Content-First Approach
When you’re writing status updates to get people to register for a webinar, remember it’s a content-first approach. Don’t just be dry and say, “Sign up for my webinar.” Make sure you’re actually providing people valuable content in the post you’re writing. Your ads, especially if you’re putting paid ads behind it, are going to feel way less sales-y when you’re solving a problem and offering free value within the content.
Give a little teaser nugget of what problems you’re going to solve and get someone to actually take a small step in your status update that’s going to have them know what you’re going to teach and take action on it before they even attend a webinar, it’s much more likely they’re going to trust you. And get excited about attending because they’ve already got results from something you’ve said.
Start asking yourself, how does this webinar add value to people? You again need to make sure that you’re giving them some value for them to pay attention to.
Ask yourself:
- How will this help entertain them?
- Why are they going to share it?
- In your status updates, can you actually make sure that it’s reflecting the personality traits that you know your ideal audience has?
Can you make sure that the headline of the webinar, the title of it is really attention-grabbing? Brainstorming 20 different headlines for this one webinar to make sure you get the best one. The rest of the headlines you don’t use, you can actually then repurpose those as status updates to get the word out about your webinar because we never know what language is going to hit the right person at the right time to convert them into that registering.
Think about what you do to make it an entire life cycle of learning for people with these webinars. Get people amped ahead of time by creating content that supports your webinar. For example, you could write some blog posts that relate to your webinar topic and share them on social media, along with a promotion. Or you could create a video series leading up to it that just gives some tidbits of what’s going to be in the webinar.
Infographics also make for great, eye-catching posts you can share on social media. These are prime social media content because they give you the space and availability to add a ton of great educational content in them. Make a checklist for people to download. It gives you a bonus of letting people go to download that checklist to build your email list even more. So make a checklist of one they could actually bring to the webinar with them or like steps to take ahead of time to set yourself up for success for this webinar. SlideShares, especially on LinkedIn, it is a really underused opportunity that people go to, to learn a lot of stuff.
Think about the ways you can get really creative about getting not only status updates about the webinar itself out there, but status updates about the content that you’re also creating around this like blog posts, checklist and infographics. The cool thing about this is you’ve probably spent a lot of time researching and pouring your blood, sweat, and tears into creating the webinar that you don’t want to just give the webinar and have all that research and knowledge just live there.
All that research and knowledge should be repurposed so more people who perhaps can’t attend the webinar can still get that valuable thought leadership from you. This is something that you know we drill into you, is all about upcycling your content, making sure you’re seen as the expert by providing people a lot around one topic. Go deep, not wide, and create content that you have research really thoroughly and that you are an expert in.
Don’t Reinvent The Wheel
There’s a lot of ways like in Canva that you can just save a template for how you can have some photos and how you can have some customizable options for these templates to go out to your followers so it’s immediately recognizable when your brand is running a webinar, especially if you’re starting to get involved in actually creating like a webinar series or some episodic content with that.
Use videos
If you’re creating ads for your webinars or even your organic posts on your feed, use a clip of the video. It can be something as short as 30 seconds of you explaining kind of why you’re excited to do this and maybe a little teaser of a really great topic or tip that you can give people. Again, the tone that you’re speaking in will make it clear to people if they’re going to connect with your story in that way and it’ll make that authenticity just pop so much more than a graphic or just text would.
Share Your Own Story
We all want to learn from people who’ve actually been through it, who’ve been in the trenches, who have learned the lessons, and they’re going to share it with you now. Tell your story when you promote your webinar. The more you can relate in a way that you’re showing people you’ve been through the struggle they’re going through right now, the more likely it is you’ll get that registrant and really makes sure that you’re creating that sense of urgency.
Talk To Your Audience, Don’t Just Shout At Them
Conversations are conversions on social media. So when we were talking at the very beginning about that status update that just asked a question in order to get people to nod their head and say, oh yes, that’s me. I do want to register for this webinar. Consider ways that you could actually start conversations with your followers by creating polls within Instagram. The poll feature in Instagram is really great, especially like in your stories, your Instagram stories. So you could use this for webinar registration because you could say, “Topic X, Y, Z. Are you interested in learning this?”
If your followers are tapping the yes or no, or if you have an open-ended question that people are just typing into you on your Instagram stories, those answers go to your DMs. You can then go into your DMs and actually send people the link to register for your webinar. It’s a much more personalized way of doing it. It is a little labor-intensive, but it pays off in dividends because that personal connection goes really far in making sure that your followers know you want them there. DMs, especially on Instagram, do go into the algorithm as well. So if you’re having these sort of “dark social moments” as they’re called, because they’re not out there for everyone to see, that actually goes into the algorithm in a way that they’re going to feed your actual posts up a little bit further because they see your community actually wants to respond to you.
Your Post-Webinar Action List
So after the webinar is done, it’s time to upcycle it!
- Download it to a video and then make a checklist of the main things that you’ve learned.
- Cut it up into some smaller clips that you can share out for videos on social media.
- Take snapshots, screenshots of some of the slides that you’ve done and share those out as well.
So these upcycling tasks ensure that you’re capitalizing on all the hard work you’re putting into the webinar and getting more content out on social media. Because in 2020 if you’re not using an upcycling strategy, you’re exhausting yourself having to recreate the wheel every single time you want to produce the status update.
Webinars are a valuable marketing tool in your toolbox, if you’re attracting enough webinar viewers to join in. Follow these tips before, during and after your webinar to make sure you get as many live viewers and replay viewers!
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