Webinars can be an effective marketing tool for businesses, especially when it comes to new customer acquisition. They position you as an expert and get participants to engage with your business. But they can also be time-intensive to develop and conduct. So it’s important to be sure you’re getting the most from your investment by ensuring a good turnout. Take a look at these ideas to promote your webinar and get noticed by potential customers.

Register Their Interest

Whether you link to it in your email invitation, website or social media, your registration page needs to provide enough information to inform and motivate them to sign up. A key feature should be the WIIFM (what’s in it for me). Explain what topics will be covered and how that information will benefit them. Don’t forget to let people know why the presenter is uniquely qualified to conduct the webinar. 

Be thoughtful about the amount of information you ask in your registration form. You want to learn who is signing up so you can make the webinar as relevant as possible. But too many fields can negatively impact your response rate. One option is to make some fields optional.

Be Timely

What’s the best day and time to hold your webinar? It depends on your intended audience. Hubspot reports that Wednesday or Thursday are their optimal days. It helped to avoid conflicts attendees had at the beginning and end of the week. Likewise, 1:00 to 2:00 in the afternoon dodged similar demands.

You can determine your best time by sending out post-webinar surveys asking which days and times work best. Some businesses do that upfront as part of the registration page, although that uncertainty might make it harder for them to commit.

Reinforce Their Choice

Let registrants know they made the right choice to sign up for your webinar. Send them an auto confirmation email immediately after they register.  It’s your chance to thank them for registering. Don’t forget to restate the “what’s in it for me” to reinforce why they signed up in the first place. Some businesses also add a link to invite a friend or colleague to the event.

Keep the webinar on their radar by including a link to add it to their calendar. Then send another email reminder just before the webinar. 

Get Interactive

Let’s face it, 10 minutes into a presentation and we all start looking at our watches wondering how much longer it will be. That’s why it’s important to build audience participation into your webinars. But don’t wait until the webinar starts to do that. 

Make polling part of your online promotion. It can be as simple as posing a question, asking for an opinion or conducting a trivia quiz. You can integrate it into an email invitation/reminder, your website or social media post. You not only engage potential attendees but you get information that will help make it more relevant. Here are Zapier’s picks for the best online polling apps of 2019.

Attract First-Timers

Direct invitations are a great start to filling seats for your webinar. But they often rely on your current contacts. What about attracting new customers? That’s why it’s important to use all  marketing channels to promote the event. 

Your social media pages offer the option of reaching a wider audience. Your current followers can share it with their contacts.  And you have the option of using paid ads that can extend your reach to targeted markets.

Maximize the return on your webinar investment by promoting it to existing and potential customers. Start with these ideas to make sure you have a full house for your event.