The best time to host a webinar is key to the success of that webinar. In the world of content marketing, time spent hosting a webinar remains one of the best engaging mediums of selling ideas or products to people. A webinar is simply put as a live seminar organized on the internet, in which the presenter engages or teaches his audience through audio and visual communication. With a good internet connection and the necessary equipment, an instructor in the city of Los Angeles can teach people from across all continents in a topic of interest. However, webinars aren’t just used as a medium to teach. They are, in fact, also used to pitch ideas and products to people who indicate interest in them. More often than not, these products are pitched in a bid to explain certain concepts to people and, in turn, have them buy a product when they’re convinced of the instructor’s expertise.
No matter what the intentions behind creating a webinar are, it is most important that people get to attend. To ensure that this happens, the webinar itself must be marketed through any practical means known. Selling your webinar gets you the crowd, but a lot of other factors contribute to eventual attendance. To ensure that your audience attends your webinar, you must schedule the webinar to hold at a time that suits them the most. Subsequent research works have tried to establish specific facts about webinar times in the past.
Through direct interaction with webinar audiences, opinions have been sampled, and valuable insights were retrieved. It was observed that most webinar attendees preferred to attend that holds in the middle of the week to other days. Mondays and Fridays were a totally bad choice for most attendees. According to a What Counts poll, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are the best days to organize webinars. More specifically, Wednesdays and Thursdays were discovered to be the days with the highest number of attendees. That being said, hosting your webinar on the best day is something and, scheduling it to hold at the right time of the day is another. Because most of your attendees will be people staying in different regions and time zones, it is counterproductive to just assume that the time in your zone as one-size-fits-all. However, an attempt to establish a middle ground on the best time for all has led to the discovery that most people prefer to have their webinars held in the morning between 10:00 am, and 11:00 am.
How to use prerecorded webinars
But, what happens when your attendees miss your webinars for reasons best known to them? Is that the end for them? If your attendees can’t access your webinar content after the regular schedule, then you are making a huge mistake. And the only solution to this is for you to arrange for prerecorded webinars that can be accessed within a specified time frame after the first time for broadcast.
When you make a prerecorded webinar, you can schedule it to run multiple times in a given period. When you do this, ensure to inform the audience that the webinar will run numerous times, so they finally get to choose the time that is best for them to attend. If nothing else, doing this helps you ensure total inclusion and helps you get more attendees in the long run.
ARE WEBINARS WORTH IT
It is expected that by now, you are already asking why webinars are even necessary in the first place. There’s a lot of benefits attached to organizing webinars for your marketing. First, webinars allow you to deliver unlimited knowledge to your audience without any stop. With videos, people just watch whatever the instructor has recorded and cannot easily interact with them to ask questions or clarify confusing topics.
This is where webinars significantly differ, you get to deliver directly to your audience, and they can see you explain concepts and also ask you the most critical questions on the spot. Also, when you organize webinars, people see you go on air to teach topics and entertain questions from the audience. This gives you a position of authority. This makes it easy for your audience to trust you and whatever service you’re trying to provide. This happens when people see you as an authority in any field; it is easier for them to become emotionally connected to your ideas.
HOW TO GET WEBINAR ATTENDEES
That you’re knowledgeable about a particular topic does not mean people would automatically attend your webinar if you organized one. To get people to attend your webinar, be ready to go the extra mile for them. For people to express interest in your webinar, you must be sure to have chosen an interesting topic. Also, you must be sure that the knowledge shared in your webinar is enough to help them kick off an instant implementation of your teachings. Email marketing for webinars has proven effective over time.
This is why you must implement an email marketing strategy to get your audience and to retain them. However, email marketing first requires that you generate leads for the planned webinar.
To generate leads for your webinar, ensure that you implement high-converting landing pages. Make your landing pages convince your audience to give you their details in exchange for value promised. When you receive the contact details of your leads, then you can activate follow-up emails for further conviction. Upon sign up, you should send them a welcome/thank you email to appreciate them for indicating interest. This is mere courtesy, and it also endears them to your emails in the nearest future. After this, you should send out more valuable email reminders that convince them even more and makes them look forward to the webinar. To do this, you must share a useful eBooks or links to blog posts that explain something about the topic of interest. All of these actions help you make sure that they do not forget your webinar even if they want to.
HOW TO INCREASE WEBINAR REGISTRATION
Getting a few people to attend your webinar is not the biggest challenge you’d face. Getting more people to attend is. Webinars are known to usually record an average of 35% attendees. But this figure is in itself a hard one to achieve if you do not put in the work. Getting a few other things done right can help you increase your overall attendance.
First, you must get your title right. It does not matter where your message is being read. If it has a bad title, people are going to ignore and scroll away. Titles, also known as headlines, contribute to the number of people that read the messages you post anywhere. Your titles must be able to catch the reader’s attention and also address their pain points in simple, yet powerful words.
You can make use of the catchy titles on your webpages, email reminders, social media posts, and much more.
Also, you must ensure that you promote for a little longer than the widely recommended 14-day cycle. If you put other known forms of promotion to use and get more. Apart from conventional email marketing, social media posts, search engine marketing, and blog promotion also prove to be effective in this regard.
Then, you must also ensure to send day-of reminders to your subscribers to remind them about the webinar. According to a Webinar Benchmark Reports publication in 2017, a significant 25% of total webinar attendees under study were found to have registered on the day of the event. This is but a simple scenario of the procrastinating nature of humans. However, you must ensure that such emails spark a sense of urgency in whoever reads them. This helps them take action without a doubt.
Humans are bound to encounter situations that prevent them from carrying out planned actions. This is also the case for a significant number of people that will be unable to attend your webinar on the set date. This should not be the reason why they don’t get to benefit from the content delivered. This is why you must implement what is known as the on-demand strategy. Through an on-demand strategy, you can make the content of your webinar available for people who were unable to attend at the set date and time. Apart from increasing your overall viewership, it also helps you make sure that nobody is left out of the knowledge-sharing process.
Social media promotion can also help you increase attendance for your webinar in so many ways. For example, Facebook Messenger has one of the highest engagement rates among all promotion mediums available to use. Facebook messages have an average open rate of 80% within the first hour of being sent out. Also, the messages are mostly read on mobile devices, which makes them easy to read no matter what kind of device it is delivered to. To implement this marketing strategy, you can use chat bots to send out registration forms and all other forms of promotional messages.
Following these guidelines doesn’t make the success of your webinar a certainty, but it makes the failure almost impossible.
