How to market a webinar so your clients and prospects actually turn up

Providing content-rich webinars to your potential (and actual) clients is a great way of marketing your accountancy firm, especially for advisory services. It's easier than you might think, and with more people used to webinars these days, it is effective too.

 

Promoting webinars - before you even plan them

You will want to be thinking about how to promote your webinar well before you think about sending out promotional material. You'll need to start by thinking about your intended audience; what they want and the language they use. That's research! It's easier for you to promote your webinar if you're delivering something they really want. The good news is you probably don't need to spend hours on it. Think about what you and your team already know and then test that you're right.

  • What topics: What are the issues that your clients really want to learn about, that you can help them solve? Yes that's likely to be things that you often get paid to do for them, or very similar things. Choose topics that you know your target audience are interested in, and phrase the titles in their language. In that way each webinar sounds more interesting. You can also have the titles on your website (or wherever your booking form is) that search engines will like to find.
  • The webinar title: It seems that everything in modern life needs to be tweetable, or more importantly condensed to something really pithy, short and inspiring. The titles are no different.
  • Who are the presenters: For most of your webinars, you may be the presenter. But sometimes working with an expert in a different field (e.g. Pensions) may be of more interest to you. What's more, if you can work with somebody else you will be able to hook their audience too.

3 parts to your webinar marketing

  1. Getting people to sign up: Hooking people's interest and getting them to say "yes please, I will give you 45 minutes of my time" sounds hard (but much easier if you've done your research), but is critical. Emails, social media and talking to people will help you get them to sign up. Don't forget this is extra value for your existing clients too, not just new ones. But there is more to promoting webinars.
  2. Getting people to turn up: Just because they signed up, and said they were interested, doesn't mean they will turn up. Our experience varies depending on topic and audience from 25% to 75%, and many other companies who use webinars say 50% will actually arrive. A promotional campaign to those who signed up is critical to even get this high. "one hour to go", "Don't forget tomorrow's webinar", etc. It sounds hard work, but can be largely automated and repeated for each webinar you run, especially if you use a system like GoToWebinar.
  3. Building on your relationship afterwards. Whether they turned up, or not, they were interested. Now foster that interest, develop your relationship with them and possibly nudge them over the line to buying your services (if that's your aim). Email notes and a copy of the recording, it helps you to keep educating them. Keep in touch with them beyond that, with regular content marketing. If some of them really enjoyed the webinar, will they allow you to use their testimonial?

8 ideas for promoting webinars

  1. Emails: Poor email marketing may be annoying, but it remains one of the best ways to communicate with people you know.
  2. Your website: A good place to advertise this amazing, free webinar.  Make sure there's a clear panel with all the information.
  3. Banners on specific blog posts: If you write articles or run a blog, adding a panel into relevant blogs is much more targeted than just using the home page.
  4. Partners: Working with selected strategic partners (or referral partners) remains one of the best marketing methods to promote your webinar. Your partners will be more likely to promote it if they're involved in running the webinars. If you want them to send out emails, give them some draft copy to make their lives easier.
  5. Social Media: There's the obvious Twitter and Facebook. But, how about posting webinar-related thoughts on LinkedIn, phrased in such a way that people will comment back. Now you know who is interested, and you can go post the sign up link on LinkedIn.
  6. Your network: Giving people at networking meetings a way to test your credibility without cost or inconvenience is a good thing. Try promoting your webinar for a few meetings. Thinking about your wider network, who knows a lot of your webinar's target audience? What might they do for you; especially if they got a recording they could use themselves in future?
  7. Recycling: Having gone to all the effort of creating a webinar, how can you recycle your content? Can the slides go onto 'slideshare' (with link to the recording)? The transcription is probably 2-3 blogs or lead magnets. Key points from the webinar could feature in your next newsletter.
  8. Introduction video: Record a short (1 minute) piece of video, post it on YouTube and send the link when promoting your webinar. You can hook your audience, as they see (and hear) you can do the job.

So, what will you do to promote and run a webinar to grow your firm?

Ready to kick-start the growth of your firm?