The 7 Golden Rules of Webinar Promotion: How to Drive More Registrants

The only thing worse than running a webinar that only ten people attend?  

Explaining to your boss afterwards how much time you spent setting up and promoting the event. 

Every B2B marketer knows that webinars can be among the best sources of high-quality leads, but many feel the well has dried up post-pandemic. Over four-fifths of webinars now attract fewer than 50 live attendees – but there are things you can do to significantly outperform those numbers. 

This blog explains how our agency has increased webinar registrations by 400% for a wide range of B2B companies, revealing the seven golden rules that deliver 95% of that uplift. 

Expect to learn: 

• Which elements of webinar promotion your company is missing 
• What makes B2B buyers really attend your webinar 
• Why creating a LinkedIn Event has such a dramatic impact on sign-ups 

Why B2B Buyers Really Attend Your Webinars 

Many B2B marketers assume buyers are perfectly rational agents, but the reality is they are driven by a host of emotional and often subconscious forces – and it's by tapping into those that you will produce a meaningful boost in your registration numbers. 

There are three very prevalent but often unacknowledged factors that lead B2B buyers to attend webinars: 

1. Research Fatigue

32% of buyers spend more than 10 hours each month researching new technology, with some investing up to 40 hours. That’s a lot of reading blogs and industry reports, and if you’ve spent much time looking at your competitors’ content, you’ll know that it probably feels like a lot longer. 

Webinars offer respite from that grind: they offer buyers an opportunity to undertake valuable research while also having a somewhat social experience. This can inform your messaging by leaning into common pain points such as: 

• Conflicting Information: Promise that your webinar will help resolve unclear or conflicting information. This is particularly effective in emerging spaces such as artificial intelligence (AI). 
• Research Complexity: Explicitly point to the volume of research your audience is expected to undertake – and argue that your webinar will lighten the load and save them from reading ten more dry business blogs. 

2. Access to Expertise 

Many buyers have specific, burning questions about the specific area your webinar covers – and they might “hope” that it will answer them. But the event will be far more attractive if you explicitly state that they will have the opportunity to ask experts directly about their biggest challenges. 

There are a few ways to do this: 

• Advertise Q&As: Foreground the Q&A section within your event promotion. For example, “At the end of the event, you will be able to ask our leading industry experts your most urgent questions on SaaS pricing strategies.” 
• Request Questions: Include a field in your sign-up form that allows attendees to register their questions. This will allow you to better tailor the event’s content to your audience, as well as boost live attendance. 

3. The Desire to Feel Useful 

Most B2B buyers are very busy, and fitting a webinar into their schedule is not easy. They may also have to tell their colleagues that they’re attending your webinar and, therefore, justify the use of their time. 

The solution is to provide a clear, pre-built rationale for attendance. Many webinars imply the value attendees will receive, but this forces the audience to bridge the gap – and may leave some anxious that their time will be wasted. Instead, paint a clear and objective picture of exactly how your webinar will make the buyer’s life easier or better, such as: 

• Actionable Steps: Make clear the event will equip them with specific measures they can take to achieve a concrete goal. 
• Professional Credits: We’ve seen many companies generate great results by promoting the fact that attendees will receive continuing education (CE) credits

7 Golden Rules of B2B Webinar Promotion 

With these motivators in mind, let’s look at seven steps our experience running webinars for 50+ clients across numerous B2B industries has shown are “must-haves” for webinar promotion: 

1. Choose a Timely Topic

Look at the language your target audience currently uses on LinkedIn: What are the underlying concerns, frustrations and aspirations you see?  Now use that insight to identify a topic and event title that: 

• Includes Keywords: Avoid buzzwords and industry cliches, but make sure your event title and core messaging include terms that your target audience is currently using. For example, the healthcare space is currently very concerned about cybersecurity performance goals (GPGs), and using that term will immediately signal relevance. 
• Triggers Emotions: Your title should immediately capture buyers’ attention and elicit a strong emotional response. This could be fear, anxiety, fear of missing out (FOMO) or any other strong feeling that will make your audience feel the need to act. 

How to Assess Your Webinar Title 

Your webinar title should immediately pose a question to the target audience – and make them feel they must know the answer.  

For example, “The Future of Content Marketing” might be a fine topic, but the title itself doesn’t create a curiosity gap; a better topic might be “Five Important Challenges for Content Marketers in Early 2025”. This creates a concrete question: What are the challenges? While also implying that they are urgent by invoking a specific period. 

2. Select Speakers Strategically 

Your speakers are often the most valuable asset for webinar promotion, but many marketers leave that value on the table. The ideal panel will have: 

• Authority: Only include speakers who increase the perceived value of your event. These should be people who offer information and expertise that your audience does not have access to within their own organization. 
• Variety: Every speaker you include should bring a specific and novel perspective to the topic. An event about AI should not just feature three different engineers; instead, you should complement your engineer with a research scientist, founder or someone who uses novel solutions in their daily workflow. 
• Synergy: Consider collaborating with a company in an adjacent space. This will give you access to relevant, high-quality speakers whilst also helping to share the event costs and promotional workload and expand your reach. 

How to Get More Value from Your Speakers 

B2B webinars are unlikely to feature “name brand” speakers, but you may have access to people with highly impressive resumes. Ensure your promotional materials properly contextualize and emphasize your speakers’ achievements, including everything from professional experience to awards, prizes and publications. And don’t be afraid to showcase company logos and link to their LinkedIn profiles on your marketing materials! 

3. Develop a Messaging Framework 

The volume of promotion required to make your webinars a real lead magnet can be intimidating: how can you possibly deliver persuasive content across all email, social and paid channels?  

A messaging framework is the perfect 80/20: you invest more time up-front to develop a stock of clear and persuasive messages – and then easily deploy them across all channels with relatively little effort. This not only makes it easier to scale promotion but also ensures you frame the event consistently across every part of the campaign – which helps increase the cumulative effect of your efforts. 

How to Create a Powerful Messaging Framework 

We have tested a range of methodologies, but the approach which produces the most consistent results has two steps: 

1. Build Your Offer: List the expected short and long-term outcomes your target audience can expect from the webinar, along with the common pain points you are tackling, and credibility triggers you will use. 
2. Create Your Core Message: Turn your offer framework into a few short paragraphs that frame the challenge your webinar solves and the specific benefits it will offer. This can easily be repurposed across all channels. 

4. Make Registration Simple 

A surprising number of potential attendees are lost due to inefficient sign-up forms: why would you trust a company with an hour of your precious time if they made just registering for the event this hard? 

Recuse those registrants and maximize sign-ups by removing as much friction as possible from the sign-up process. You can do this in a few different ways: 

• Reduce the number of fields required to sign up. Aim for a maximum of 3 “Required” fields and only collect the most critical details. 
• Include multiple CTAs on your Landing Page. Don’t make the audience scroll back up to the top of your page to find the form; give them an easy link from the middle and bottom of the page. 

5. Promote Via Your Website 

Many buyers visit your website and read your content without sharing their contact details – which means you miss potential leads. Your webinar is a perfect way to capture those prospects and feed them into your pipeline. 

Create website pop-ups to promote your webinar. This can implemented site-wide to maximize reach or calibrated to only appear on pages that are relevant to your topic – meaning any buyer visiting the page is “primed” to be interested in the event. 

6. Leverage LinkedIn Ads for Webinar Promotion 

Low webinar attendance is often a sign of limited reach: are you promoting your event widely enough and with a large variety of buyers? LinkedIn Ads are a powerful tool to quickly expand your pool of potential attendees and create more “buzz” around your event. 

Invest time and resources to create persuasive and thumb-stopping creatives. (Our recent guide provides everything you need to do this.) Then, repurpose those ads to deploy a remarketing campaign that pushes “interested but unpersuaded” buyers over the line – and helps maximize your overall sign-ups. 

7. Create a LinkedIn Event 

A shocking number of B2B webinars do not even create a LinkedIn Event – let alone use it to its potential. Our experience shows that simply using LinkedIn Event pages has a dramatic impact on attendance, with many events seeing a large majority of total registrants using the LinkedIn Event page to sign up. 

They offer two core benefits: 

• Accelerate Sign-Ups: LinkedIn Event pages allow attendees to sign up directly and avoid leaving the platform. 
• Simplify Promotion: Your internal stakeholders and guest speakers can more easily direct their network connections to a LinkedIn Event page than an external Landing Page.  

Ultimately, a LinkedIn Event page can become the central node to a large and highly efficient webinar promotion strategy – but you do need all the other pieces in place, too. 

Want to Know the Rest of Our Secrets? 

These seven golden rules are at the heart of the webinar promotion “recipe” that helps us reliably increase attendance by 400%. But there are many more factors to consider - most of which the average webinar promotion campaign misses out.  

Download our free checklist for 37 more proven tips that will help you save hours of effort and attract more leads.