How to Amplify Webinar Distribution and Attract the Right Audience

Maximize the impact of traditional communication channels

There are three main traditional communication channels that most companies regularly use to promote their events, be they physical or virtual: email, social, and website. 

Let’s go through them to see how to use them best if we want to amplify webinar distribution and attract the right audience with the ultimate goal of either raising brand awareness or getting more leads.

Email

Using emails for webinar distribution is probably something we all already do. In all honesty, it’s probably also what we would normally rely on to get most of our webinar subscribers.

We have, however, a couple of tips to ensure that it becomes a reliable source of leads:

• Send out a dedicated email. Of course, you can use newsletters and include your webinar in it. We would recommend you take this action a long time in advance of your webinar. What is really going to grab attention is using a dedicated email: this is sure to perform way better than a hold-all one. You can expect your audience to focus all its attention on it, get to know what the webinar will entail, and whether or not it’s their cup of tea, which will ultimately help you get the right people in the room.
  
  
• Make your copy snappy. Grabbing one’s attention is not easy, not in a world where too many companies are trying to do the exact same with the people you’re targeting. AB testing a good subject line and copy is a first step you can take: you want to keep your email short and sweet, so a catchy tagline, snappy subject line, and an emoji or two will do the trick. Avoid combining multiple CTAs in one email, as it will distract the receiver.
  
  
• Segment your audience. This is something that is really gonna make a difference, of course, and comes back to what you're trying to achieve: are you targeting existing customers? Are you only targeting leads? Are you trying to get the attention of those who are interested in this or that topic… Something that might help put things in perspective is going through different personas to understand how exactly you want to segment your audience.

Social media

Social media is a good way to engage with your community of followers, especially if your goal is brand awareness. Let’s go through the main actions you’ll be taking on social media to promote your virtual event:

• Social media posts. Make sure your posts are diverse: have ready-made posts, different copies, scrolls, combinations of each, etc. If you really want to take your promotion to the next level, video content is the way to go. For example, short video teasers of the speakers talking about what's coming up for the webinar are great for engagement.
  
  
• LinkedIn events. Creating a LinkedIn event on the platform is a great way to showcase your event in a clear way: people can easily sign up for it, and the process is made seamless by LinkedIn: you just click participate, and you're in the webinar instead of having to go through the full registration form.
  
  To make sure that people actually attend your event, you can connect your preferred webinar platform to the LinkedIn form with a Zap, that way, people will be looped in, will receive reminders, and will end up in your CRM. Basically, you’re making sure they're a lot more engaged, or at least, you're increasing the chance that they actually attend your webinar.
  
  
• Restream your webinar live. If you want to do brand awareness and don't care about gating your content, then live-streaming your webinar will attract a lot of people and tap into your pool of followers. You will not get all the data of who's attended like you would via a traditional registration form, but it is an amazing way to raise awareness about your brand. 

Website

Leveraging your website is really important if you want to increase traffic and have people engage with it and your content.

So, again, who do you want to talk to?

Based on the main topic of your webinar, you're gonna be selecting the right, relevant pages on your website to actively promote your webinar: this could be just using simple banners on your home page or on specific pages with pop-ups, but it can also be more than that. It all depends on what you want to achieve.

For example, you can promote it on your blog and highlight it, but you can also add a CTA that links to your live webinar within existing articles. You can do the same thing in-app, too, and you're gonna be segmenting toward who you want to reach.

Leverage employee advocacy for webinar distribution

Even with all those traditional promotion channels and all the best practices one can gather to make the most of them, it's becoming harder and harder to promote webinars. More and more companies are doing webinars, and the quest for attention is real.

Paid advertising does work when you want to get people to join webinars, but it does come at a cost, obviously. This is not to say that you should exclude it altogether, but there is a way for you to cover quite a bit of those costs by using your own employees. 

When we go one step back and look at the numbers, we see that: 

On average, the overall network of company employees is at least 10x larger than a company's follower base (Source: LinkedIn Business). 

Nearly 64% of advocates in a formal program credited employee advocacy with attracting and developing new businesses (Source: Hinge Research Institute & Social Media Today).

We typically see that because of the trustworthiness of those employees, they also convert better in later stages of the funnel.

Companies can get up to more than 5x greater reach when messages are shared by employees (Source: Hinge Marketing).

We always talk about reach as a bit of a vanity metric, but you need reach. It starts with reach, and then it becomes about conversions, clicks, obviously, subscribers, and then what converts into leads and new business. 

It's not just about expanding the reach on social media; it’s also about reaching the right audience to do that. As a company, you want to build that credibility and build that brand trust, and the power of personal recommendation, as we like to call it, is really crucial to attract the right people. 

The affiliate link campaign

On the Ambassify platform, the Affiliate campaign enables you to share a specific content piece with your community that contains an individual tracking link unique to each member of your Ambassify community. This link allows you to track the number of clicks and interactions the content piece receives.

Practically speaking, what happens is your ambassadors just click on the LinkedIn button, and the webinar promotional post is automatically shared on LinkedIn. More importantly, through conversion pixels, you can automatically and completely track the performance of those posts via the Ambassify platform (and see who brought in new subscribers into the webinar).

The referral campaign

Alternatively, the Referral campaign allows your advocates to refer someone by filling in their contact details and/or sharing a referral link. When you share the referral link, the receiver will have to fill in their contact details themselves.

While an Affiliate campaign requires the page you are sharing to contain the tracking code, a Referral does not.

These campaigns are typically used, of course, for webinars but also to build your customer base, recruit new team members, etc.