21/02/2021

With the advent of Covid-19, events, trade fairs and conferences have been cancelled worldwide. This has impacted consumers, businesses and the economy as a whole in a myriad of ways. One of the main areas that has been affected negatively is the marketing and sales sector within traditional B2B industries. Namely, this sector heavily relies on conferences both for lead generation and to drive awareness within their target audiences. When looking at alternatives for these type of events, webinars emerge as a salient tool worth considering; so let’s explore some cost-effective ways to increase your webinar registrations. 

Why are Webinars Effective? 

Webinars are seminars given online, they can be pre-recorded and on-demand or live, they can involve more than one host and can oftentimes be interactive in nature (but not always). They can cover any potential topic but typically focus on subjects related to the solutions or focus industry of the company giving the webinar. 

Webinars are excellent tools for inbound marketing as they are instructional and engaging for attendees, generating leads by requiring signups in advance. Furthermore, once created, it can be recorded and used as a lead magnet on your website indefinitely. With tools such as Gotomeeting, Gotowebinar, zoom or Webex, it’s easier than ever to create a professional webinar and to transfer your audience into your CRM for future conversations. Additionally, the possibility of including an interactive component enables you to start conversations with targeted leads that are among the attendees, further setting the stage for future outreach by your sales team. It’s important to note that webinars are a B2B marketing tool that should be part of the marketing and sales funnel. Most typically, it’s considered to be part of the consideration stage of the funnel, which is where the prospect is aware of what problems or opportunities they may be facing. This means that when leads are part of the webinar, they should already have a significant degree of interest and openness to learning about what solutions could help them or their team. 

Despite the aforementioned benefits of webinars, there are challenges that traditional marketers may not be used to. Due to webinars essentially being an online trade fair/conference, it can be tempting to use the same approach as a with a physical event. Specifically, at an in-person conference, simply putting a booth and letting people come to you is enough to generate conversations and garner interest. However, obtaining registrations for a webinar is more demanding due to the large amount of new and old webinars available online. Moreover, making sure the right people attend your webinar is even more difficult. So how can a marketer consistently obtain webinar registrations? Let’s explore. 

Methods to Increase Webinar Registrations

LinkedIn Advertising

We’ve talked about the immense opportunities available on LinkedIn for B2B companies a multitude of times and for a number of different use cases. In terms of webinars, it remains an equally valuable outlet to attain a strong attendee list. LinkedIn boasts the largest professional audience in the world, meaning that the lead quality from display ads posted on LinkedIn is much higher than on other platforms. In addition, LinkedIn allows one to use a lead capture form to directly transfer webinar signups to your CRM system. 

Use an email sequence

As soon as a prospect has signed up for your webinar, an email sequence should begin to keep their engagement until the webinar has been given. Commonly, people signup for webinars in advance, so your email sequence should remind them of the value of the webinar, and warn them in steady intervals until the start time. Sharing useful teaser information is a great way to maintain their interest. 

Have one-click signup

As mentioned, the benefit of marketing your webinar on LinkedIn is that users can directly signup through the LinkedIn lead form. Ensuring that signups are quick and efficient is important in today’s age of short attention spans and continuous notifications competing for your audience’s attention. 

Social Selling

The benefits of Social Selling are most typically discussed for its ability to start conversations and generate meetings. Nevertheless, adding relevant contacts on LinkedIn to your network and personally inviting them to webinars either through message or LinkedIn’s invite feature, can be an efficient methodology to hyper-targeted attendees. Increasing the quality of your webinar audience. 

Display Ads

Beyond LinkedIn ads, display ads on other websites that have professional audiences can be excellent ways to generate signups. Just ensure that the websites being targeted possess audiences that are relevant to your solutions and industry (which should also be reflected in your webinar topic). Another effective method to ensure correct targeting with your ad campaigns is to use retargeting tools to present ads to prospects that have already been on your website.

Optimise your Landing Page

If you chose to redirect ad clicks to a landing page rather than directly signing up on LinkedIn, make sure that your landing page is high-converting. Testing different designs and approaches can make a big difference in the number of attendees you manage to gather for your webinar if you find approaches that work better than others.