Webinars are effective in today’s content landscape for engaging and teaching a specific audience. Live webinars are a highly versatile content type you can use to cater to leads in all stages of the buyer’s journey, engage with and answer any questions from your viewers, and identify highly qualified leads to send directly to the sales team.
Once your team decides on an engaging topic to cover in the webinar and compiles the content for the event, you can focus on strategizing promotion of your webinar. Within HubSpot, create the following assets to educate your audience and drive registrants for your webinar:
- Call-to-action to promote your webinar in a variety of formats
- Landing page and form to capture registrants
- Follow up email to confirm registration
- Workflow to nurture attendance*
*Workflows are available for Marketing Hub Professional, Marketing Hub Enterprise, and Sales Hub Professional.
Read on to learn more about how to strategically create each of these assets to boost registration and attendance numbers.
1. CTA
You should be creating a call-to-action (CTA) to spark curiosity or excitement within your potential audience member. Your CTA can take form in plain text link, a text button, or even an image, all with the purpose of leading someone to your landing page to register for your webinar.
Once you create a CTA, you can insert it in emails, website pages, blog posts, etc. While it may be tempting to add your CTA everywhere, think strategically about where to place this CTA. We can use the content of the webinar paired with the context that we collect on our intended webinar audience to locate the appropriate places that will drive the most engagement. A few examples of marrying content and context to find strategic places to highlight a CTA could include:
- On the product homepage or on similar product pages if you're showcasing a product or service demo.
- On a complementary blog post covering a topic that's related to the content in your webinar.
- An email message targeted to individuals who attended an in-person event, viewed a specific page, or filled out a specific form that relates to the content covered in your webinar.
As you experiment with the placement of your CTA, you're checking on the way viewers engage with your CTA and where the most clicks are coming from. Wherever you decided to highlight your CTA, you need to ensure it directs individuals to your landing page so they can register for the event.
2. Landing Page/Form
A landing page will be a page on your website dedicated to the promotion of your webinar. The landing page has two distinct components: the form and the compelling text that persuades the viewer to fill out the form to take advantage of the webinar content.
Arguably, the form is the most important part of the landing page because it collects a list of registrants for your webinar. While the form can suit this basic function, we can view this as an opportunity to collect valuable information from our leads that we can use in the nurture process. See if you can collect information that would help qualify leads that should be fast-tracked to your sales team.
Your landing page text should entice the viewer to fill out the form on the page. To persuade the viewer that your offer is a fair exchange for their information, try to provide information on what they will learn in the webinar. Consider asking questions that insert doubt into your leads’ minds around their current processes. Highlight surprising statistics you and your team have uncovered that will shed light on the webinar.
Whatever way you choose to assure your viewers that the offer is valuable, ensure that you point them toward filling out the form to sign up. Once they submit the form, we can send more detailed information to their inbox.
3. Follow-up Email
You should always send your leads a confirmation that their registration was captured successfully. In HubSpot, once a lead submits the webinar registration form, we can send them to a thank you page and send them a follow-up email.
You have two ways to set up a follow-up email after the form is submitted. If you're looking for a simple, non-stylized email that looks like a receipt, I recommend choosing Send a follow-up email in the form's options. If you would like to build a more stylized experience mimicking your other marketing emails, I recommend choosing Add to workflow in the form's options.
No matter which type of follow-up email you set up, you should include information like:
- The date and time of your webinar
- How to access it (a link, a page, etc.)
- Any readings or deliverables they should complete before attending
- Additional offers to take advantage of before or after the webinar
Based off the captured registration, you can confidently conclude the lead is interested in the webinar’s topic. Your next challenge is to ensure these registrants show up to take advantage of the webinar's content. You can increase attendance by sending the lead appropriately timed emails leading up to the live webinar.
4. Workflow
While registration numbers are important, you need to ensure your registrants actually show up to the webinar! You can use workflows to send timed communication that will keep your webinars top of mind for the lead and remind them to carve out time to attend your webinar.
You should build a fixed-date workflow centered around the date of your webinar, as seen in Example 4 of this blog post. You can use this type of workflow to send communication before and after the selected date, e.g., seven days before the webinar, one day after the webinar, etc.
Look to promote completion of any pre-work necessary to understand the webinar, link to additional readings to excite the registrants about your webinar topic, or even send out an interactive quiz to understand the knowledge level of your participants.
After your webinar, you should have a strategy of your next steps for your leads. Will you send them a follow-up email with another CTA to sign up for another webinar? Will you ask them to speak to sales? Will you send them into another workflow promoting other content offers to take advantage of?
Let us know on the Community what you've done in your most recent webinar or what you look to do as next steps after your webinar is complete.
