When launching a new product, you must advertise it vigorously to attract as many potential buyers as quickly as possible, because even the best product won’t sell by itself.

Why should it be any different for your webinar? Here, too, you need to make it clear to potential participants that there is a webinar of interest to them about a given topic. If you advertise your webinar effectively, you will boost the number of participants.

Contents
▶ Advertising webinars successfully
▶ Effective measures to advertise webinars
▶ 1. Advertise webinars on your own website
▶ 2. Advertise webinars in your own newsletter
▶ 3. Advertise webinars in social media posts
▶ 4. Advertise webinars on specialist portals
▶ 5. Advertise webinars with exclusive mail shots
▶ Conclusion

Advertising webinars successfully

When you advertise a webinar, it’s similar to when you advertise a product: selecting appropriate measures will significantly increase the likelihood that you’ll get a strong response.

So what’s the best way to reach your target group? When you ask yourself this question, the first idea may be to use your own website as an advertising forum. While this is a good start, it is far from sufficient – it will only let you reach professionals who are already actively searching your website for information on your products or fields of expertise.

Effective measures to advertise webinars

Depending on whether you give your webinar lecture live at a certain time or host it for “on-demand” access at any time the viewer wishes, various advertising measures come into question.

Unlike a live webinar, an on-demand webinar is a recording that’s hosted online. The recording is just as informative, only that participants cannot ask questions live. The advantage of “on demand” is that viewers can access the webinar at a time of their choosing. This allows providers to reach significantly more participants without any additional effort.

1. Advertise webinars on your own website

Your webinars definitely belong on your own website. But you need to make sure that they are easy to find. The best way to do this is via a separate menu item, for example “Events & Seminars”. This has been implemented well on the website of the company NETZSCH-Gerätebau , where visitors can quickly find the webinars that interest them.

Webinars are easy to find via the “Events & Seminars” top navigation bar

Your website has an integrated search function? Make absolutely sure that it lets your webinars be found. That’s obvious, you might think? It ought to be, but this isn’t implemented on many company websites. My assumption: webinars have only been added as a new type of content relatively recently. No one has recognized that this content needs to be indexed in order to be found through the search.

Tip: Test your website’s search function. Start with typing “webinar” into the search field. Do your search results show the webinars that are hosted on the site? Repeat the test for “webinars”. Do you get the same search results? If this test is successful, potential viewers will find the webinars on your website. Otherwise tell your webmaster about the problem to ensure your webinars do not remain invisible.

2. Advertise webinars in your own newsletter

Advertise webinars: the company’s newsletter generates measurably more registrations

Newsletters are an excellent medium to promote your webinars effectively. Your newsletter lets you reach your existing and prospective customers directly and keep full control of when you want to promote a certain webinar.

Newsletter entries that focus on a single topic have proven successful. You can advertise on-demand webinars in your regular newsletter, like the company C3 Prozess- und Analysentechnik does very well in its C3-News newsletter.

3. Advertise webinars in social media posts

Successful companies regularly use LinkedIn to draw attention to their webinars. Shimadzu Europe, for example, shows how this works.

When advertising a webinar on the company’s LinkedIn page, the basic structure of the post is simple:

• What is it about?
• When will it take place?
• How can you participate?

More than 4,700 followers were informed about a webinar. This may be good, but it’s still not enough. You can measurably increase the reach of a post if you actively motivate your sales and customer care teams to share it.

Conspicuous advertisement for a webinar on the company’s page on LinkedIn

When sales staff share the webinar post, the reach increases measurably

Among Shimadzu’s 4,700 followers are around 90 employees. Of these, 24 work in sales and are therefore perfectly placed as multipliers to promote the webinar. Because the contacts of your sales staff are predominantly made up of existing and prospective customers, your sales team can reach the target group for a webinar with excellent precision.

Sales staff are ideal multipliers when it comes to advertising webinars

On average, a member of Shimadzu’s sales team has 214 contacts. This means that the sales team’s total reach is over 5,100 contacts. If the entire sales force were to share a post on the company page, the reach would double.

Tip: Keep encouraging your sales team to share company posts. This will ensure greater reach.

4. Advertise webinars on specialist portals

Specialist third-party portals are an important channel of marketing communications. They let you reach your target group while minimizing the risk that potential customers buy directly from your competitors.

Extensive online libraries of webinars are attractive to potential viewers because they usually cover a wide range of topics. However, make sure that the right webinars can easily be found through a structured search facility. Otherwise, your webinars would quickly get crowded out and overlooked.

Specialist portal without a filter function

ElectronicDesign’s portal hosts hundreds of webinars, but there is no filter function, so most people will only go through a few descriptions before giving up – bad luck for you if your webinar is listed 33rd, for example, and overlooked when scrolling down.

Lack of a filter function makes it difficult to find the right webinar

Specialist portal with a filter function

A reliable filter function lets potential viewers quickly find the right webinars. A useful filter function is integrated into the specialist portal chemie.de, for example. Its features to narrow down search results helps to find the right webinars with just a few clicks.

The structured search helps to quickly find the right webinars

Advertise webinars in newsletters

Advertising webinars within newsletters increases their visibility

Depending on availability, it is possible use the regular newsletters of specialist portals to further advertise webinars of yours. The science and industry portal chemeurope.com illustrates the benefits.

More than 400,000 professionals use the portal every month. Customers can book to have a webinar hosted online for a period of 12 to 36 months. This means that the webinar is accessible around the clock over this period, generating a GDPR-compliant sales lead with every registration.

In addition, the webinar is advertised in the chemeurope.com newsletter, bringing it to the attention of its more than 25,000 English-speaking readers.

Advertising on specialist portals is the best way to reach potential customers that don’t yet feature in your address database. They mean new sales leads for you, which your sales team can turn into customers.

Tip: Search for your competitors on reputable specialist portals. Finding them is a clear signal that you should be there as well. Otherwise, you’ll miss out on market opportunities by leaving the field to your competitors.

5. Advertise webinars with exclusive mail shots

Third-party mail shots (also known as stand-alone mailings, eBlasts or EDMs) are an exclusive form of advertising that specialist portals make available. They let you take advantage of the wider reach of the portal’s newsletters. For example, a stand-alone mailing on chemeurope.com delivers your advertising message (and no one else’s) to up to 25,000 subscribers. This ensures that your advertising message receives unshared attention.

Third-party mail shots let you reach your target groups with precision

Successful third-party mail shots to promote webinars

With a third-party mail shot to advertise a webinar, your efforts focus on a single goal: generating registrations. Readers will immediately see what the webinar is about, allowing them to decide fast. An eye-catching call-to-action, such as “Sign up now”, will clearly and decisively prompt them to take action.

Advertise webinars through exclusive third-party mail shots

Conclusion

Advertising your webinar is the best possible way to generate a higher number of previously unknown viewers, while your own newsletter reaches your existing contacts.

To attract new viewers to your webinars, you should also use third-party specialist portals. They let you host your webinars on-demand around the clock. Exclusive mail shots help you to measurably increase the number of participants.

If you’ve already recorded webinars for target groups in chemistry, pharmaceuticals, life sciences, analytics or food & beverages, I recommend our webinar libraries:

There’s more information about what the Webinar Library can do for you here.