Every B2B marketer knows that webinars can be an unparalleled source of leads. However, as the market has become saturated, driving attendance has become harder – and 83% of events now generate fewer than 50 live attendees.
That is why webinar marketing and promotion has become a crucial skill for B2B marketers. From social media campaigns to email sequences, most companies use at least a few platforms to advertise their events. Yet most overlook one of the most powerful tactics: paid webinar ads.
This article explores how webinar ads can dramatically increase the volume of registrations your webinar generates, offering proven best practices we have used to increase attendance at our clients’ events by 400%.
Expect to learn:
- The three factors that determine the impact of any webinar ad
- How the brain processes digital ads – and what that means for your webinar
- Six key elements to create stand out webinar ad creatives
Why Your Webinar Needs Paid Ads
Many businesses rely on their existing email contacts and social networks to promote their webinars. And while these are important factors in the promotion process, there are three problems that arise:
- Limited Audience: Even if you have a very large existing audience, restricting your promotion to individuals that are already aware of your business will make it harder to reach your registration goals.
- Lack of New Leads: You are unlikely to generate new leads, meaning your event only serves as a lead nurture campaign.
- Fewer Conversions: The average conversion is influenced by multiple touchpoints, as the audience “keeps hearing about” your event on different channels. As a result, limiting the number of channels you use will likely reduce overall registrations.
These issues can be combatted through paid promotion, which helps you:
- Reach a Wider Audience: Paid ads can be targeted at highly relevant audiences that have not yet organically interacted with your content. This is vital for companies with limited pre-existing email lists or whose events have historically struggled to attract enough attendees.
- Retarget Warm Contacts: You can also build remarketing lists based on people who visit your website or LinkedIn page and the list of marketable contacts in your CRM. This means you will reach your audience on multiple platforms, which helps to reinforce your message, increase awareness and keep your event top of mind.
However, your audience will be served several webinar ads from multiple companies every time they scroll through LinkedIn. That means your ad creatives need to stand out from the crowd, so a few fundamental factors must be in place.
3 Factors That Make or Break Your Webinar Ads
Before you even think about creating webinar ads, you need to establish three things:
1. Your Pain Points
B2B webinars are most effective when they lean into a very specific audience with a highly relevant topic – and the same is true of your ads. But as anybody who’s created buyer personas knows, there are an almost infinite number of factors you could consider when building an audience. So, what is the most important thing for your webinar ads?
The answer is pain points. You need to identify the challenges that keep your ideal audience awake at night and create ad copy that speaks directly to those concerns. These pain points should be:
- Urgent to your audience
- Relevant to your event
Note: This does not mean your webinar needs to be highly specialized; some of the most successful webinars are intended for a low-expertise audience. Instead, it means you must have a precise set of pain points that are highly relevant to whatever audience you choose to target.
2. Emotional Impact
The reason pain points are important is simple: they help you create an emotional impact on the audience. Most B2B audiences are senior leaders and executives, who are time-poor and very careful about what they spend their attention on. The only way to convince these people to even read up on your event – let alone attend it – is to create an emotional hook.
There are a few reliable ways to do this:
- Competiton: Suggest that your webinar will help them get ahead of competitors.
- FOMO: Suggest that their competitors may gain an advantage if they don’t attend your webinar.
- Urgency: Suggest your webinar topic is time-sensitive and important in the immediate future.
These should be reflected in both your webinar title and your promotional messaging.
3. Authority
Your audience is likely only interested in hearing from genuine experts. They receive 100s of marketing emails and numerous sales calls each week – all of which give them conflicting information. As a result, these buyers rely heavily on authority signals to determine which voices to listen to and which information to trust.
Your webinar can achieve this authority in two ways:
- Respected Speakers: Invite industry experts to join your panel and advertise their credentials throughout your promotional campaign.
- Respected Partners: Invite other well-established companies in your industry to either co-host or sponsor your event.
If any of these elements aren’t in place, your ads are likely to underperform. That is why we recommend companies consider the promotion process during the initial webinar planning – to ensure you develop an event people will actually want to see.
Where Should You Run Webinar Ads?
There are two channels that produce reliably superior results for webinar ads:
- LinkedIn: This is the most popular platform for B2B marketers and offers great options to build a custom audience based on audience data to really ensure the right people receive your ads.
- Google Display Remarketing: This allows you to serve ads to specific audiences who have already interacted with your content in some way. This helps create that sense that your event has a “buzz”, as the audience is seeing it advertised in multiple locations.
Pro Tip: Even though they’re not considered ads, simple website pop-ups can convert a large proportion of organic traffic into event registrations. This is a very small lift for your team, but they should be sure to configure the back-up so that pop-ups do not appear on your event landing page.
How the Brain Processes Digital Ads
The average person looks at a digital ad for around 2 seconds. But during that time, they are unconsciously:
- Scanning for Relevance: The brain instinctively looks for signals to evaluate the relevance of the ad to their immediate goals and interests. This is known as “goal-directed attention” within neuroscience departments, but we can just call it the “Is it for me?” test.
- Assessing Value: The brain automatically assesses the value and trustworthiness of the ad based on aesthetic signals. Is the image high-quality? Are the design elements balanced? Are there signals such as familiar logos that suggest trustworthiness?
These two factors enable the audience almost instantaneously to decide whether the ad is worth paying attention to. Faced with so much information, this ability is essential – otherwise, we’d all waste hours every day evaluating the merits of the 100s of ads we see.
But more importantly for our purposes, this process also gives us insight into how we can make webinar marketing ads more likely to stop the scroll – leading us to a handful of best practices.
5 Key Elements of a Strong Webinar Ad
1. Eye-Catching Design
The best webinar ads stand out visually on the audience’s LinkedIn feed. There are several ways they can do this, and creative designers should be given room to take multiple approaches that can be A/B tested to determine the best direction.
However, there are a few reliable features most strong webinar ad designs share:
- Striking Colors: Use a strong palette that stands out amongst other ads from companies within your industry.
- Human Images: Use images of people your audience can “see themselves” in. Are they the right age? Do they dress like your audience? Are they in a familiar business setting? Also, make sure at least one of them is looking directly at the camera and that facial expressions are positive.
- Reflect the Copy: Use images that reflect the themes and messages on your ad, to create a pleasing sense of cohesion.
2. Benefit-Focused Copy
Given how little time the average buyer will look at your webinar ad, it’s important to use the few words you have to signal the benefit of your event. Most strong webinar ads use short, clear and decisive phases:
- Verb Focused: Encourage your audience to do something.
- Concrete Benefits: Avoid general or abstract language; your audience wants clear, concrete benefits.
- Industry Specific: Use terms that resonate with your target audience and demonstrate knowledge of their niche.
- Succinct: Keep your word count low and focus on highlighting one key message.
3. Authority Signals
Many webinar marketers miss a trick by not foregrounding their speakers’ authority. Your ads don’t have to be about the speakers, but you should definitely:
- Include photos of your speakers with their names, job titles and company logos
- Highlight impressive credentials, such as Ivy league university affiliations or impressive statistics about their careers
Note: Some B2B marketers choose to create separate creatives that focus heavily on individual speakers’ credentials, which can produce very impressive results.
4. Emotional Triggers
As discussed above, your core messaging and event title should already be engineered to create an emotional response in your target audience. But your paid ads are a great opportunity to leverage a few more key triggers, such as:
- Social Proof: From the number of peers attending the event to the number of companies that trust your business, social proof is a powerful tool to increase trust and trigger FOMO.
- Scarcity: Your ads can drive urgency by warning the audience that spaces are limited, or your speakers are in-demand and don’t appear in lots of events.
5. Direct CTA
Generating attention is not enough for your ads to fulfil their purpose – they must also prompt registrations. Your CTA must therefore be clear, direct and promote urgent action.
There are two key factors at play here:
- Design: Is your CTA large enough and clear enough?
- Copy: Is the language relevant to the offer and enticing?
How to Maximize Your Webinar Marketing ROI
Once you’ve created exceptional webinar ads that tick all of these boxes, there are a few important steps to help generate more value from your ad campaign:
- Make Sign-Up Easy: Ensure the audience can easily find the registration form and input their details without being redirected or clicking through multiple pages. Pro tip: auto-populate form fields with known information if possible.
- Create a LinkedIn Event: Connect your LinkedIn ads directly to a LinkedIn event page where the audience can learn more about the event and sign-up - without leaving the platform.
- A/B Test Creatives: Optimize your ads as the campaign progresses by testing different design elements and messages to determine what resonates most with your audience.
- Send Event Reminders: Ensure buyers who sign up through webinar ads actually attend by sending them reminder emails a few days before the event to get them excited and ensure they don’t forget.
- Plan Post-Webinar Nurture: Ensure your webinar attendees become highly qualified leads by creating a post-webinar promotional campaign that encourages them to book a demo or meeting with your team.
Get Five Free Webinar Topics from ProperExpression
At ProperExpression, we understand how stressful it can be to get started planning a webinar. That’s why we offer free consultations where we will present five webinar topics guaranteed to drive high attendance.
How do we know? Through our webinar marketing services, we have run 100s of successful webinars for clients across multiple B2B industries – increasing attendance by 400% and generating 25x ROI.
Want to get your free topic ideas?
