How to Create a Killer Webinar Marketing Strategy

Maximizing your webinar ROI takes more than preparing riveting content and speakers and going live. The most compelling topics will fall flat if no one shows up to your virtual event — or if you’re failing to attract the right audience of high-quality leads.

Banzai’s data shows wide variations in attendance rates across industries.* For example, software and services companies often need to work harder to drive attendance, with only 28% of registrants showing up on average. Industries like healthcare, accounting, and HR generally have more show-ups — 42% — but this could still be improved. 

Our study also showed that across all industries, strategic techniques like sending out email reminders skyrocketed audience numbers. 

That's why you need an effective webinar marketing strategy to drive registrations, boost attendance, and engage your attendees. 

In this guide, we'll walk through key steps for designing a webinar campaign that helps you create buzz, connect with your target audience, and plan + execute webinars that drive real business impact. Let’s go! 

‍* Banzai Webinar Statistics Report, 2024

Why You Need a Great Webinar Marketing Strategy

In a recent study on webinars and virtual events, marketers cited strategic alignment plus event experience design and delivery as their two biggest obstacles. 

Without strategic planning, it's nearly impossible to consistently compel and convert your audience. Ad hoc efforts will inevitably struggle to increase webinar registrations, boost attendance, and engage leads. 

But webinars are far too powerful two-way engagement marketing tools to neglect. When done right, virtual events allow you to:

• Connect with audiences in the interactive format they crave.
• Showcase thought leadership by educating audiences on complex topics. 
• Generate and nurture high-quality leads.
• Engage and retain existing customers or upsell/cross-sell. 
• Gain data-driven insights about your audience's challenges, interests, and knowledge gaps.

Webinars are an essential component of modern marketing. But you'll only realize the full potential with an intentional strategy that aligns your virtual events with your core goals and quantifies their impact.

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Build a High-Impact Webinar Marketing Strategy in 10 Steps

Our comprehensive, 10-step framework will guide you through the process from initial planning to post-event follow-up. By taking a strategic approach, you’ll be able to promote and deliver webinars that draw and engage high-quality leads. 

Use our steps as a framework, but remember you may need to customize your strategy based on the unique goals, audiences, and buyer journey stage you’re targeting, as well as your resources.

1. Define Your Objectives

Setting clear goals and KPIs will help you to proerly focus your efforts and measure your webinar ROI. 

Start by considering your overall marketing and business objectives: What problems do you need to solve? Why are you hosting a webinar? What goals do you aim to achieve through it? 

For example, you might want to:

• Generate warm leads for your sales team to follow up with
• Build up an audience for your content
• Position your brand as a thought leader on your topic
• Educate attendees on the value of your solution
• Nurture relationships with current customers

Then, set KPIs that align with each goal. That might be number of registrations, attendance rate, lead quality score, attendee satisfaction score, or attendee engagement level. 

Banzai’s solutions include Demio’s webinar tools, which give you comprehensive, easy-to-understand analytics. Our reports cover everything from attendance and conversions to how much time your attendees spent focused in your session — and how much individual participants engaged. That helps you measure your success, improve your webinar strategy, and score your leads.

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2. Identify Your Target Audience

You need to deeply understand your audience to create relevant messaging and virtual event experiences.

If your goal is to generate new leads through engaged webinar attendees, you’ll need to articulate who these potential customers are and how you’ll connect with them as the foundation of your engagement marketing. 

Create full buyer personas, including: 

• Age, gender, and level of education
• Relationship status and whether or not they have kids
• Job role
• Income range
• Goals and motivations
• Key challenges
• The social circles or groups they hang out with
• Social media channels they’re active on

You’ll also want to think about their funnel stage or where they are in their journey with your brand. 

We recommend focusing on the emotions prospects feel as they get to know your products or services. Building your webinar marketing around these different states will make sure you’re putting your time and energy into communications and content that truly resonate.

For example, to target early-stage leads, you could create webinars that educate viewers on common pains and problems in the industry and promote them widely via specific LinkedIn groups, Slack channels, and email newsletters. 

For leads building up the confidence to make a decision, you may want to offer Q&A-focused webinars to address their doubts — or run in-depth case studies that paint a picture of your solution in action.

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3. Choose the right topic and content

Bad webinar content will drive audiences away — but a compelling, relevant topic is the best way to attract the kind of leads you want.

Start by brainstorming a list of potential topics based on audience challenges, interests, and knowledge gaps you’ve uncovered during your research. Look at what industry leaders — and leading publications and media channels are doing. 

Review these through the lens of your goals and KPIs. Narrow down your ideas by asking yourself: will this topic move the needle on conversions, lead gen, or other priorities?

Match your topic and content type to your audience needs as well as their buyer journey stage. Industry overviews, tips and tricks, or guides can be great top-of-the-funnel educational webinar content. Product demo webinars are better suited to bottom-of-the-funnel prospects. 

If the purpose of your webinar is to establish thought leadership or work on your brand positioning, you may want to focus on expert-led content about challenges, trends, and insights. That might mean sharing new data and insights or running panel events, fireside chats, or workshops with special guests.

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Whichever content type you choose, make sure you incorporate interactive elements to hold your audience’s attention. Polls, Q&A sessions, downloadable resources, and featured actions all boost engagement and help your webinar stand out.

4. Optimize the Webinar Landing Page

Once you’ve identified your webinar goals and topic you can begin crafting messaging that lands with your target audience. 

Start by optimizing your landing page. This is where you’ll drive traffic, offer information about your webinar, sell people on its value, and convince them to register.

Conversion optimization experts often turn to psychological principles to design landing page language, positioning, and message types that elicit action.

Some important principles to keep in mind when optimizing your landing page include:

• Pain-pleasure — People have a basic instinct to seek pleasure and avoid pain. This heavily influences decision-making. On your landing page, you’ll want to tap into pain points or frustrations and show how your webinar provides a solution.

• Loss aversion — Humans are more motivated to avoid a loss than to pursue a gain. FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is a key manifestation of this. That means you can create a sense of urgency and exclusivity by announcing that spots are limited or by featuring a countdown clock for time-limited registrations.

• Self-determination theory — This makes us think, “I want what they have.” On your landing page, you can leverage this psychological phenomenon by including testimonials and reviews for social proof of how your webinars have driven results for others. 

Most importantly, you’ll want to keep it simple and make it easy. People want clear and concise information about what’s being covered in the webinar, who it’s for, and why they should sign up.

The registration form should be easy to find and simple to fill out. The more hoops a person has to jump through to sign up, the more likely they’ll abandon your registration page before converting.

You’ll also need to make sure you optimize for search engines to improve your chances of driving traffic to your landing page. 

Use SEO best practices, employing keyword tools like Google Keyword Planner or Keywordtool.io to help determine search volume. Then, look to place your shortlist of keywords strategically on your landing page. You could include them in headers, meta descriptions, header tags, and page copy, and insert your primary keyword into your landing page’s URL.

Remember, though, always prioritize people over search engines. Make your landing page copy compelling and readable — and look to address your audience’s search intents and needs

5. Create a Workback Plan 

A workback plan is a scheduling method that lets professionals assign resources and tasks in reverse order. 

Build a plan starting with the webinar launch day and then work in reverse to identify all the important tasks you need to accomplish from end to beginning. 

Think about: 

• Concept — Your main topic, special guests, webinar structure (do you need a Q&A session?), and more
• Logistics — Including your webinar platform setup, booking speakers, and practice runs
• Marketing — The tactics you’ll use to promote your webinar at different moments — a month out, a week out, and day of, for example. ‍
• Comms — The timeline for email notifications and reminders your attendees will receive
  
  

6. Involve Your Sales and CS Teams 

Webinars aren’t just marketing tools. When done right, webinars serve your wider business goals and your entire company, including your sales and CS team members. 

Getting cross-functional input will also help you to build great content and ensure consistent messaging and follow-up. 

Before kicking off planning sessions, schedule a meeting with your sales and customer success teams to discuss and align your overall objectives for the webinar. 

During this meeting, you can identify shared marketing, sales, and customer success goals like: 

• Increasing brand awareness 
• Attracting high-quality leads
• Transforming leads into free trial users
• Converting free trial users into paying customers 
• Scaling the product onboarding 
• Cross-selling or upselling your product 

Sales can give useful input on buyer challenges to shape your topics and calls to action for conversion-focused webinars. Customer service teams can advise on customer-facing elements like testimonials and identifiable examples. 

Moreover, working closely with your sales and customer support teams will help you extend the reach of your webinars — they can promote your events to their contacts, including prospects, company accounts, and existing customers. 

You’ll also want to stay in close contact with sales teams responsible for post-webinar follow-up. With tools like Demio, you’ll be able to segment your audience based on engagement levels so they can prioritize the warmest leads. 

7. Set up a strong email marketing campaign 

Well-timed email campaigns will increase your sign-ups, generate anticipation and excitement, and boost attendance. 

Email lets you connect with people who are already on your contact list and are an ideal fit for your webinar. Messages can be sent quickly, return almost immediate results, and are easy for recipients to forward on to others. 

Here’s how to do it: 

• Segment your lists based on buyer stage. Send tailored messages speaking to their goals and challenges.
• Start promotion early with a "save the date" email 1-2 months out. Offer exclusive early bird access or countdowns to drive buzz.
• Spotlight different speakers, topics, and actionable takeaways in each different email instead of blasting your list with the same content. 
• Share sneak peeks and excerpts of presentations to build anticipation.
• Use attention-grabbing yet professional subject lines highlighting what's in it for them.
• Coordinate with sales to reach out to qualified leads and accounts with personalized invites.
• Send reminder emails at strategic times: 1 week before, day before, day of, hour before the event. 
• Add the webinar to your team's email signatures.
• Co-market with partners to send an email to their qualified contacts.
• Create nurture emails promoting registration for on-demand webinars and replays. 

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👉Want to create impactful webinar emails quickly and easily? 

Download our virtual events email templates pack and watch your attendance and engagement soar! 🎉📤

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8. Promote via Social Media

Leveraging organic social promotion across platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook extends reach. It’s especially useful for driving awareness early in the buyer journey, but you can also target long-term followers and niche communities in LinkedIn groups (and even Slack channels). 

Here are some key ways to drive interest through your social media channels: 

• Determine the channels your audience uses. If you’re targeting people under 25 for instance, you may be more likely to find them on Instagram or Tiktok, rather than Facebook.
• Cross-post, but focus on a few key channels for your social media posts
• Paid advertising on social media is another great way to yield strong results because you can use the segmentation options available in the advertising tool. This allows you to hone in on specific audiences who are a match for your webinar.
• The key is knowing what channels your  audience uses. 
• Share posts about the webinar topic, speakers, examples early and often.
• Use video clips of speakers discussing key points as shareable social content.
• Use Twitter and LinkedIn polls to check interest in the topic, decide on your content, and spark discussion 
• Organize live AMA (ask me anything) sessions for experts to tease content.
• Join industry conversations by engaging with relevant hashtags and groups.
• Collaborate on cross-promotion with partners, influencers, or sponsors.
• Pin posts or Tweets about your webinar to the top of your feed, or advertise in your profile photo, so it’s the first thing people see. 
• Turn your registrants into your promoters by using tools that make it easy for them to share on their social media — and even incentivize them for referrals and signups.

9. Use Tactical Advertising

If you have the resources or budget, thoughtful advertising will extend your webinar reach beyond your existing channels. 

Start with your own website. Feature banner ads, videos, and pop-ups prominently on your homepage and key website pages (like blog posts) related to the webinar topic.

You could also look to advertise on partner websites or do partner syndication. Make sure any potential partner sites cater to a similar target audience without being direct competitors., Also consider which brands best reflect your values and reputation. 

Other possibilities include: 

• Running LinkedIn sponsored posts promoting your webinar, targeted by job role and industry
• Purchasing sponsored pay-per-click keywords related to the topic on Google Ads 
• Using Facebook/Instagram carousel ads to convey the value of your webinar
• Using content syndication platforms such as Outbrain or Taboola
• Advertising on industry publications your target audience reads
• Webinar marketing software that specializes in audience acquisition like Banzai’s Reach

10. Run Post-Webinar Promotional Campaigns

Your webinar marketing doesn’t end once the session is over. Replays, on-demand webinars, and automated webinars can produce results months after their initial streaming date. After the webinar, reach out to attendees, no-shows, and attendees who left earlier, with targeted emails giving them a chance to watch the recording, any relevant special offers, and extra treats like gated downloads. Giveaways and goodies keep the excitement going.

Make sure you use a webinar platform with strong analytics features so you can segment your attendees easily and understand which leads were most engaged so you can prioritize them.

You can also use follow-up to generate interest in your existing on-demand webinar collection. With tools like Demio, you can make on-demand webinars interactive, engaging experiences by including polls, surveys, timed downloads, and featured actions. AI-generated chat will even let your on-demand attendees ask questions and get more context about the event.

Activate a High-Performing Webinar Marketing Strategy

With your audience constantly bombarded with offers, both on and offline, you need to stand out to attract their attention. Developing a high-impact webinar marketing strategy that cuts through the noise requires a strategic approach. 

It's time to put the steps we covered in this article into action. Build your webinar marketing foundations by defining your goals and target audience — and designing content formats around them. Then, collaborate with sales and customer service functions and map out a workback plan. Finally, promote your webinar with optimized landing pages, email campaigns, social media, and advertising — even after your live event ends. 

A dedicated webinar marketing platform like Demio will help you to build engaging, effective webinars, send out effective email reminders, and promote your events through your attendees. 

​​Done right, webinars become an engine fueling your inbound marketing. With our strategic plan, customized to your unique audience and company, you'll be primed for webinar marketing success.

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