Webinar Promotion Methods

Too many marketers treat webinars like one-off lead gen plays. Run the event, send the recording, plan the next one. But the teams getting the most out of webinars treat them like content engines, using multiple touchpoints to promote them and creating multiple assets from each one. Here’s how: 🔹 Before: plan & promote. Design the webinar around what you want the final content to generate. Think about how you can pre-plan the moments to clip later. Start outlining that blog recap now. And when it comes to promotion, don't stop at email invitations. Find ways to embed the registration link into existing content channels — a new or popular blog post on an adjacent topic, the bios of all your social channels, etc. (At SparkToro, I can consistently add 100-200 extra registrants by embedding the registration link in a new blog post.) 🔹 During: reward active engagement. Having live attendees is nice; having active chat participants is even better. Invite people to engage directly in the live chat. Ask open-ended but simple questions that are easy for people to respond to. Make sure you're also using that chat in real-time — drop notes, reactions, answer quick questions that don't need to be verbally addressed during the presentation. 🔹 After: remix & reassign. One recap email isn't enough. A single well-run webinar should become multiple LinkedIn posts, a blog post, YouTube clips, and sales talking points — assets that serve social media, content marketing, and sales. Give each content asset a new job. This mindset has mattered a lot for SparkToro Office Hours, which typically gets ~1,200 signups. It’s also very aligned with how Goldcast talks about online events too — not just hosting webinars, but turning video into clips, blogs, social posts, and more. Link below in the comments to learn more. #GoldcastPartner

A Content Director told me yesterday: “We’re sitting on so much unused content, it’s insane.” Most teams have a BIG distribution problem, and it's costing them more than they realize. Marketers churn out webinars, eBooks, and articles—then promote them with a couple of LinkedIn posts before jumping to the next project. They're focused on volume. More blog posts. More webinars. More, more, more. No matter how much they produce, they're always behind. Overwhelmed. Frustrated by the low ROI. But here's the thing: you can't expect to get full ROI from your content if you're only promoting it with a couple of LinkedIn posts. Content distribution isn’t an afterthought. It determines whether your content will be successful or not. Here's the distribution playbook we use for B2B companies with long sales cycles: 1. We develop highly relevant topics based on data from customer research and recent sales calls. 2. We select 3 subject matter experts within our client's organization who are comfortable on camera and willing to build their LinkedIn presence. 3. For each topic, we conduct a 1-hour video interview with an SME. 4. We curate the best insights from each interview recording and turn them into 1 long-form article, 5 video clips, and 8 LinkedIn posts. 5. We publish this content from the personal LinkedIn profiles of your SMEs (3-5 times per week). Personal LinkedIn profiles get 5x the reach of company pages, so you're missing out big time if you only focus on your company page. 6. We repurpose the interview content across other channels: → Articles and video clips on your website → Full interviews on YouTube → A weekly newsletter with the best insights 7. After 3 months, we launch LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads to amplify your experts' best-performing posts. 8. After 6 months, we launch an employee advocacy program to turn other employees into a powerful organic marketing channel with massive reach. We repurpose existing content to fuel this program. _____ 👉 Is your team stretched thin and are your SMEs too busy to write? At Leadwave, we've helped 50+ B2B companies create thought leadership articles, video clips, and LinkedIn posts from interviews with their experts. Book a free content strategy call with me here: https://lnkd.in/eSqakbR8

We studied how companies like Clay, ZoomInfo, Apollo, Carta and Sendoso run webinars. Here’s 4 tips to get up to 20% more pipeline from your webinars. 1. Add an ‘invite a colleague’ modal after a successful webinar sign-up to boost registrations by 10%+ 2. Insert a thumbnail in the follow-up email you send to registrants who didn’t attend to increase on-demand viewers by 15%+ 3. Auto-trigger an email to people who watch on-demand with a ‘get a demo’ CTA to increase hand-raisers from population by 20% 4. Use Sequel.io to host the webinar directly on your website to: - Integrate webinar analytics to the rest of your site analytics  - Re-target anyone who attended and visited your pricing page  - Increase your primary CTA submissions by 30% during the webinar event - Streamline the whole set up and post-webinar process to save 5+ hours/webinar

Here's how most people promote webinars 👇 1) Email your list 2) Paid promotion 3) Run the webinar 4) Send the list of registrants to sales to follow up    (sales ignore it) 4) Email the webinar recording 5) Put webinar on your website and gate it    (visitors ignore it) 6) Plan the next one Here is how to make webinar sales' favorite playbook, not the most ignored. 1) Co-create webinar narrative together with sales to address the interests and challenges of target buyer persona. To avoid blatant product pitching, start by answering a question: Imagine having a 60-min lunch with your target buyer persona who is not aware of our product and is not in the market. How would you highlight potential challenges, seed the grains of change and explain the solution? 2) Agree on promotional plan¹ Make sure sales actually want to invite their target accounts.  Agree on: Accounts and titles (how many?) Touchpoints (e.g. sales - email + LinkedIn, marketing - newsletter + LinkedIn ads) ¹ attached the actual promotion plan we use. 3) Develop post-event playbook based on account engagement history What sales hate is when marketing marks all sign-ups as MQLs and asks to follow up. It's a waste of time because of misalignment with the intent: Webinar sign-ups ≠ buying intent. Instead, agree on post-webinar analysis: - matching contact engagement to account engagement - identifying tier 1 & tier 2 accounts that are already engaged - identify new tier 1 & tier 2 accounts (first engagement) for account research - define "bridge" activities (e.g. free strategy sessions) to book discovery calls instead of pitching a demo 4) Develop a post-webinar nurturing content hub Content hubs are microsites with nurturing content: - Recording - Slides - Useful resources - Bridge activity  - Case studies The beauty of the process? Your buyers will come to the hub multiple times, might share with your team, while you receive notifications about the content consumption and engagement. It creates a perfect opportunity for timely, fully personalized follow-ups. --- If sales don't see a value in the webinar, they will never promote or follow-up with webinar "leads". Educate -> engage -> create demand -> research and understand the buyer journey stage and current needs of your prospects -> create "bridge" activities / buyer enablement. This is how you influence the buying process with webinars and generate pipeline TOGETHER.

last week, i asked what incentives actually get people to attend webinars live (instead of just watching the replay later). 150+ linkedin comments later, here's what works (according to marketers who run webinars): 𝟭/ 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿 𝘄𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗿: 𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗤&𝗔 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀 this showed up in almost every comment. but here's the key - it can't be generic Q&A. Seth Merrill from SixFifty runs 20+ webinars/year with 400-1000 attendees. their secret? they answer 50+ typed questions per session with three legal experts. "the type of advice people would normally have to pay a consulting fee for"... delivered live. Kerry Wheeler at Lattice did a roundtable discussion between attendees and their HR leadership after a webinar. became their highest attended and best converting webinar of the year. access to senior execs during the live session is a genuine draw. 𝟮/ 𝗲𝘅𝗰𝗹𝘂𝘀𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 Mark Huber from UserEvidence offers bonus resources only for folks who show up live. Lindsay Adams 👽 at SixFifty offers HRCI and SHRM recertification codes only for live attendees. professional development credits are a tangible incentive. 𝟯/ 𝘂𝗻𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗱𝗲𝗱 𝘄𝗲𝗯𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗿𝘀 (𝘆𝗲𝘀, 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆) Sydni Williams-Shaw tested this at a previous SaaS company and saw attendance jump from 35% to 55%. two reasons: (1) customers were more willing to join as speakers when it wasn't recorded, (2) they focused on engagement as the success metric since they were building community. Jordan Arnold doesn't offer recordings at all - 77% average attendance rate (double what he got when offering recordings). shoutout to Jay Schwedelson who apparently pioneered this. 𝟰/ 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝘁 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘂𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗹𝘆 𝗳𝘂𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹 Blake Cohlan added trivia + prizes to webinars and it was a big hit. Alexa Smythe from UserGems 💎 is running "12 Days of Intent" with prizes - you have to attend live to win. Madeleine Work and Tara Robertson send post-webinar gifts to people who participated. physical gifting as a thank you for showing up. 𝟱/ 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘁𝘆-𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗹𝗲 Amrita Mathur (who's run 50+ virtual conferences) nailed this: "what works is not being transactional and thinking about it as part of community building. there's both immediate and long-term pay off here." her tactics: prizes & perks for attending, surprise guests, access to tools/books/frameworks, speakers/panelists that are normally hard to get to, good vibes. "make the experience so good, they want to come back just to have fun (and some of them eventually bought, and so did their friends)." === what i'm taking away: the webinars that drive live attendance aren't trying to trick people into showing up. they're creating something that only works live - whether that's access to experts, peer discussions, time-sensitive content, or building towards longer-term community.

This one email can double your webinar registrations. Most marketing teams and webinar hosts send their webinar invites way too early. I used to do it too. You build the landing page. You write a promo email. You start sending it 7-10 days before the webinar. Then you cross your fingers. But the first email usually gets the lowest registration numbers. And the one that often works best is the last-minute reminder. Sent 4 to 6 hours before the webinar goes live. ⚠️ Yes, the same-day email. The one your team might be scared to send. When I tested this with clients, the same pattern kept showing up. The bulk of signups came in on the day of the event. Not the week before. Not even the day before. Why does this work? People wait until the last minute to decide. Their schedule is packed. They don’t know what they’ll be doing in 3 days. But they do know what they’re doing this afternoon. This is especially true if you’re inviting salespeople, founders, or anyone in a reactive role. They don’t plan their calendars a week in advance. So here’s what I recommend: 👉 Send your normal invites 5–7 days out. 👉 Send an invite the day before 👉 Then send one final email 4–6 hours before you go live 👉 And don't forget the reminders Use a short, clear subject line: “Starts today: [webinar title]” “Going live in a few hours – join us” Mention what people will learn. Keep the tone relaxed. Don’t sound desperate. This single email can boost attendance fast, especially if your audience is busy. Try it once. See if it works for you. Then add it to your playbook. ♻️ Repost to help your network get more webinar registrations ➕ Follow me for more tips on webinars and funnels

LinkedIn has just launched Off-Platform Event Ads, rolling out globally and available to most advertisers from May 6. Here's what it does and why it's a useful update for B2B teams. For a long time, if you wanted to promote an event through LinkedIn Ads, your options were: 1️⃣ Build a LinkedIn Event Page and accept that registrations would live inside LinkedIn before you tried to sync them back out. 2️⃣ Skip Event Ads entirely and run standard Sponsored Content to your own landing page missing out on the on-platform optimisation capabilities of event ads. In reality, most B2B teams I work with run their events through Zoom, ON24, Goldcast, Bizzabo, or their own custom registration pages. Field events, executive dinners, roadshows, partner sessions, in-person summits almost none of these live natively on LinkedIn. So the Event Ad format never really fit how marketers actually work. What's changed: You can now run an Event Ad that points to any external URL, your webinar platform, your registration landing page, your livestream destination, your in-person event microsite. No LinkedIn Event Page required. You still get LinkedIn's professional targeting (job title, seniority, industry, company size, function) and the in-feed Event Ad creative treatment that tends to outperform standard Sponsored Content for event promotion. Registration, form fields, consent flow, and CRM routing all stay in your own stack. For pipeline-focused teams: ✔️ Attendance rates stay in your event platform ✔️ SQLs, meetings booked, and influenced revenue stay tied to your existing attribution ✔️ You can segment performance by LinkedIn targeting cohort without building anything custom If you've been skipping Event Ads because the format didn't match how you actually run events, this is the update that closes the gap. Worth a test on the next webinar, roadshow, or dinner series in your calendar. #LinkedInAds

I’ve been looking back at the webinars I’ve helped clients run this year, and here are the lessons from the setup and marketing. 1. The topic and title do most of the work. Clear, plain titles outperform everything else. If someone cannot repeat it in one sentence, they won’t register. 2. The internal phrasing you use inside your company does not translate. And if the webinar reads like an obvious sales pitch, they won’t even click. 3. There is a point where the effort outweighs the value when it comes to supporting materials like slides/presentations. If you need weeks just to prepare the slides, the channel becomes too heavy to run consistently. 4. Warm and cold audiences need different paths. Warm contacts convert quickly with simple, direct copy. Cold contacts move slowly and need weeks of lead time. If you want them, start LinkedIn outreach more than a month ahead. 5. Your existing network is often the strongest segment. They outperform new lists when you treat them as their own group and write to them directly. 6. LinkedIn and email have different jobs in webinar promotion. Using only one channel cuts registrations in half. 7. Hosting platforms still make this harder than it should be. Riverside has the best recordings but a confusing experience for speakers and the audience. Zoom is smoother for everyone live, but the recordings don't look great. Separate audio and video tracks should be the bare minimum. My main advantage is working with founders and teams who already have something meaningful to share. Everything else starts to fall into place after that. Including the time I spend editing the recordings ☕

In the past 8 months, we've run 11 webinars & driven 30,000+ signups. Here're the 8 tactics we've used to promote them: Quick context: So far this year, we've run 11 webinars: • 4 have been pure organic • 4 have been pure paid traffic • And 3 webinars have been "hybrid" And in total, we have driven 30,000+ signups. Here are the 8 tactics we've used to promote our webinars: Tactic #1: Launch email sequence These are 5-7 day sequences with 7-10 emails (depending on how hard we want to promote). Popular email themes: • "Here's what we're going to cover in the masterclass" • "Here's what can happen when you implement the frameworks" • "Last reminder to register!" Tactic #2: Cross-promo emails We send 1-2 soft invite emails to our other vertical email lists (when there's topic congruence). Only have one list? Partner with other creators for email swaps. Tactic #3: Free community announcements We have one free Skool community. So the week before the webinar, we send 1-2 community-wide announcements inviting people to the event. We also add the event to the community calendar so people can see it there. Tactic #4: Social posts We generally make 1-2 social posts linking directly to the webinar landing page. We do mainly on LinkedIn, though we're also starting to incorporate this into other platforms like IG & YouTube. Tactic #5: Viral giveaways Every week we launch new lead magnets on LinkedIn. But during webinar weeks, we use these assets to promote the webinar. Tactic #6: Paid ads Primarily Facebook ads, but also experimenting with LinkedIn ads with great results. Recently added cold ads to drive registrations, too (previously we were only doing retargeting). Tactic #7: Newsletter ads We buy ads in newsletters with great audiences and sometimes we use our inventory to promote webinars. These work very well! Tactic #8: Manual emails and DMs Usually, we have our sales team reach out to high intent people in their pipeline as well as high-intent, high potential prospects (e.g. people who applied to join but never booked a call). That way, we can use the webinar both as a "discovery" and as a "conversion" mechanism. And that's it! The beautiful thing about this playbook is that most of these tactics are free (or very low cost) and can be applied to almost any business or niche. So, hope this is helpful!

We spent $47,985 on ads for a live webinar and generated $147,437 in revenue. Here’s the full playbook I use to make webinar funnels work: If you're selling anything for $1K-$3K+, webinars are one of the most reliable ways to convert cold traffic into buyers. Why? Because webinars turn cold leads > warm leads > buyers in a single session. But not all webinar funnels work equally well. We recently tested three approaches: •⁠ ⁠Live webinar: 3.07x ROAS •⁠ ⁠7-day educational email course > webinar: 1.44x ROAS •⁠ ⁠Evergreen webinar: 1.37x ROAS So, if you're actively selling a higher-ticket product, run ads directly to a live webinar. Here’s how to do it: 1. Keep the ad funnel extremely simple Run ads 7-14 days before the webinar. The winning structure looks like: UGC-style video ads > registration page > email/SMS reminders A few rules I always follow: a) Founder-led ads outperform static ads 90% of the time b) The angle is always Proof + Promise (You did the thing > you’ll show them how > they get the outcome) 2. Know the numbers (these are real benchmarks) a) Cost per lead: $5-$20 (depending on niche + wealth + platform) b) Show rate: • Cold: 20-30% • Warm/list: 40-50% c) Cost per attendee: $15–$100 d) If you sell directly on the webinar, a strong conversion rate is 5-10%. For a $1,000-$2,000 offer, that means you want a $300–$1000 CAC. e) If your offer is above $2,000, you should push people to book a call rather than buy straight from a page. Book-a-call benchmarks: • 10-30% book a call • 60%+ show rate • 30-40% close rate (should be HIGH - they JUST watched you for 60–90 minutes) If your close rate drops to ~20%, it’s usually a sales problem, not a marketing one. 3. If conversions drop, fix the qualification If the webinar is packed but nobody buys or books calls, the leads were wrong. You need 1 qualifier on the registration page. Examples based on ICP: • “Do you have at least $5,000 to invest?” • “Do you already own real estate?” • “Do you run a newsletter with 10,000+ subscribers?” • “Are you earning $250K+/year?” If you don’t qualify, you will dump unqualified leads onto your sales team, and they can’t close them. 4. Give away something only for live attendees This is the biggest lever for increasing show rates. Once you have a valuable giveaway, start reminders 7-10 days before: • Send multiple reminder emails • Send “we’re going live” emails • Sell the usefulness of the webinar, not the product 5. What to teach inside the webinar Teach for 80%. Sell for 20%. But don’t teach the whole system. I skim the top of every step required to get from A > B: • Show the roadmap • Show the opportunity • Show the proof • Show the desired end state People don’t buy information. They buy certainty, feedback, and “tell me exactly what to do in my case.”