If you are looking for productive and cost-effective ways to interact with customers, prospects and staff, webinars can offer you an effective solution. However, you need to identify your target market and promote your webinar effectively to maximize the number of participants. Since the actual turn-out rate of registered participants is about 40% to 60%, you will need to devise effective means for promoting your webinar to entice people to attend it. Here are some tips to find your target audience and market your webinar to them.
Finding your webinar audience
Most businesses make a mistake of offering a “blanket’’ webinar to customers having varied tastes and preferences. Rather than targeting a single webinar for all, you should organize different webinars for different segments of customers. Remember - your webinars will produce better leads when you segment your market and create specific webinars targeted to meet the needs of your best groups of customers. The more targeted your message is, the more is the chance of your attendees understanding it and wishing to get involved.
You can find your webinar audience by:
- Approaching people on your opt-in mailing lists
- Asking your existing customers to attend
- Checking if your past and present business associates are interested to attend
- Using social networking platforms like Twitter, Facebook etc
- Using online professional networks like LinkedIn
Many experts believe that webinars should be publicized 2-3 days prior to the actual event as stretching the publicizing and registration for it for too long may make people forget what encouraged them to sign up in the first place. However, depending on what your expectations are from the webinar, you may promote it just 2-3 days prior to the event or extend the promotion-period to a week or two. Though traditional modes of advertising like TV, newspapers and magazines can help to find your target audience and promote your webinars, it’s best to go online to make the entire process quick and easy on the pocket.
Marketing the webinar
Once you have got people interested in your webinar and earmarked your target audience, you should market your webinar to pull in the maximum number of participants. Here are some ways to help you in your endeavor:
Social networking sites: You can use your social networking accounts to drum up some publicity for your webinar. Posting interesting news and anecdotes about your upcoming webinar, writing a short piece to offer a sneak-peak into what the webinar will offer and linking it with your web page, and inviting people from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter to attend are some ways to market your webinar.
Online forums: Posting news about your webinar on various online forums is another way to get the word out and make people interested in it.
Online PRs: You can publish PRs related to your webinar subject on various online PR sites to market it.
Freebies: Everyone loves freebies and you too can use freebies to bait your target audience and market your webinar. The promise to offer a whitepaper or e-book with key webinar tips and tools to all attendees, or a free tool/program to host webinars with ease etc are some of the ways to promote your webinar.
E-mails: Sending e-mails to your target audience that comes embedded with a link to register directly for your webinar can also help in advertising your webinar.
Audio-Visual Presentations on YouTube: You can make a short audio-visual presentation related to your webinar, which will entice viewers to attend your webinar, and upload it on YouTube by using relevant tag phrases that makes it show up for relevant search phrases.
Traditional modes: You can use TV, newspapers and magazines to place your webinar ads and pull-in people who are interested to attend.
News sites of search engines: News sites of search engines like Google News, Yahoo News and MSN News pick up news from wire services used by PR professionals. You too can use major wire services like PR Newswire, Business Wire, or Market Wire to release your webinar press release, which in turn will show up in the news services of big search engines and help you in marketing your webinar.
Thus, use your creativity and business acumen to find the target audience and market your webinar to them effectively to maximize participation, thereby ensuring the success of your event.
| Next > |
|---|
