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:
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:
These issues can be combatted through paid promotion, which helps you:
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.
Before you even think about creating webinar ads, you need to establish three things:
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:
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.
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:
These should be reflected in both your webinar title and your promotional messaging.
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:
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.
There are two channels that produce reliably superior results for webinar ads:
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.
The average person looks at a digital ad for around 2 seconds. But during that time, they are unconsciously:
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.
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:
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:
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:
Note: Some B2B marketers choose to create separate creatives that focus heavily on individual speakers’ credentials, which can produce very impressive results.
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:
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:
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:
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?