3 Ways Start-Ups Can Increase Webinar Attendance

Written by Jessica Crook, Customer Relationship Manager for RapidScaler

Ramping up a start-up marketing effort often calls on some serious right brain activity. As you are looking to engage and grow your client base, the first thing you should do is stop selling and start sharing. Seriously? My reply is “Absolutely.” Webinars are a great way to do this. You are able to provide your audience with industry related information they will enjoy and be able to use, in an environment and time that is minimally obtrusive to their workday.  And you can do this without cramming your elevator pitch down their throat. But how do you drum up interest and attendance? 

Use your social networks. This does not mean the day before your webinar (or even the week before) you join every social networking group there is and blast your message across the net. You should absolutely NOT do this. Plan ahead. Let’s believe you are currently utilizing social media on a professional basis. 

Here is how we maximize our social networks to drum up webinar attendance. These techniques have doubled our webinar attendance and have provided us at least 2 - 3 good software/services sales of $20K or more each.

When to Host

Our research suggests that people are most willing to participate in a webinar on a Thursday. We schedule two webinars to accommodate all  timezones. Our first is at 10 AM CST and our second is at 2 PM CST. We have been able to cover San Francisco to Moscow with this scheduling. We even get attendees from Delhi to Shanghai on our morning session. Most APAC customers are used to attending US based events at night.

 

LinkedIn 

Join groups that are interested in your line of products or business. If you sell apparel to small boutiques, find groups on LinkedIn that boutique owners belong to. You can also search for store buyers as well and see what groups they belong to. Be creative and think about who your audience could be. Engage in the conversations online and offer advice or feedback that has NOTHING to do with pitching your product. Then, when the time is right for your webinar, SHARE the opportunity to participate. Approaching your LinkedIn Groups this way will help build your brand credibility as well as long term relationships with potential clients.

Email 

Send out a personal email to your contacts, especially those you have already had an exchange with. Save a mass email campaign (this is good for a broader reach) for when you simply have too many contacts. Take the time to look up your contacts you would most like to attend your webinar and tell them so. People like to feel recognized and appreciated and reaching out to them one-on-one via email is a fast and easy way to do this. It is sheer flattery which can go a long way. Your email can be a template you put together to use over and over; but add that personal touch. “How was your week?” “Last time we talked…” and so on. Then cut and paste. Even if most of your email is broiler plate, the email is still perceived as you taking the time out of your day and thinking about that person. Priceless.

Our research (and Google Analytics) suggests that we get the most engagement activity on our emails and website on Thursday mornings. We do all email drops by 8 AM Eastern on Mondays, 1 week before the webinar.

Twitter 

So you just started tweeting and you may only have around 30 people following your company. You’re first strategy should be to find out who your most influential tweeters are in your network. Hopefully these are people you have had other interactions with in the industry. If not, find ways to have interactions and conversations. (Refer back to the LinkedIn suggestions.) Leverage these Twitter masters to help you get your message out by giving them something interesting to share with their audience. Again, send out a personal message to them asking them to “help” you share your webinar event. 

Conclusion

There is a whole psychology behind asking someone to do you a favor that works very well, but we can cover that another time. Start preparing for a webinar in advance by keeping your online relationships primed. Make the time to send out a personal message and give your audience something they can benefit from. Let me know how successful this style of “selling” was for you, and any other creative ways you found to engage and drive traffic to your webinar.

Jessica has 9 years of sales and customer relationship experience in the creative agency industry. She provides excellent customer care at RapidScaler. Jessica is one of the first people customers meet at RapidScaler and the one almost every customer goes to when they need something. She is highly organized, anticipates needs, and provides proactive service even before our customers know there is an issue. Not only does she provide excellent customer, she is simply a very pleasant person to work with.