How to Create a Webinar Marketing Strategy (+5 Tactics to Use)

You've organized an exciting webinar, decided on a timely topic, secured speakers, and set a date. The only thing missing? A webinar marketing strategy to give your event the attention it deserves.

To host a successful webinar, you need a plan to promote your event, secure registrations, and meet key goals. We'll walk through how to create a strategy and share five webinar marketing tactics to improve outcomes.

What does webinar marketing involve?

Webinar marketing is a strategy that focuses on promoting virtual events to meet goals like increasing registration, improving brand awareness for the host or partners, and generating leads. To meet these goals, marketing teams use tactics like email marketing, social media marketing, and content marketing.

A successful marketing strategy is important for:

• Attracting more viewers: When more of your target audience knows about the webinar, you can expect more signups.
• Engaging customers: The more attendees you attract, the more you can use webinars to interact with prospects and customers in real time via live chat and Q&A sessions.
• Increasing brand authority: Webinars are ideal for sharing exclusive knowledge and organizing thought leadership events, both of which can boost brand authority.
• Building a webinar funnel: Your webinars don't have to be one-time efforts. Instead, create a webinar funnel that generates leads and guides viewers toward a conversion.

How to create a webinar marketing strategy

Use these steps to develop a strategy to promote your webinar.

Establish goals for the webinar

First, decide on the objectives you want the event to achieve. To set goals, get clear on why you're hosting the event in the first place. For example, you may want to:

• Educate prospects: Teach potential customers about your product or service via an in-depth tutorial or walkthrough.
• Improve lead generation: Attract your ideal customer profile (ICP) by sharing exclusive webinar content that speaks to their challenges.
• Establish your brand as a thought leader: Position your brand as an authority by hosting a virtual roundtable or panel discussion with valuable content from industry figures.

Define specific key performance indicators (KPIs) for the webinar. For example, set a goal for registrations, attendance, engagement, and conversion rate.

According to Livestorm's 2024 Webinar Marketing Report, brand awareness is the most common goal for webinars. Lead generation and sales come in second and third, respectively.

Get to know your target audience

You probably don't want just anyone to sign up for your webinar. To attract the right attendees, you need to know your audience.

Draw on your ICP research or do additional customer research to understand your target audience's challenges, pain points, and goals. Then, decide on a topic and an angle that align with their interests and needs.

Plan a compelling webinar

Once you've done the preliminary research, you're ready to plan your webinar. Based on the topic, designate the appropriate person to host the webinar and decide if you need to recruit guest speakers.

Then, create an outline for the webinar. Use Livestorm's webinar outline generator to turn a topic into a plan in seconds.

While you may not want to plan every word of the webinar, it's also helpful to have a script that speakers can refer to. Save time by using Livestorm's webinar script generator to help you plan what to say.

Decide on a promotion timeline

Next, plan a timeline for your webinar promotion.

Let the scale of the event and the type of audience guide your timeline.

For B2B audiences, best practices are to begin promoting events about four weeks ahead of the event. This way, attendees can save the space on their calendar and increase the likelihood that they can tune in live.

For high-profile events with prestigious speakers, consider starting promotion even sooner. This way, you'll have an easier time attracting registrations and meeting your webinar marketing goals.

No matter your start date, you'll typically want to create multiple different pieces of content to promote your webinar up until the day of the event. This way, you'll be able to capture the largest possible audience.

Choose webinar marketing channels

As an event marketer, you can choose from many different channels for webinar promotion. Most marketers use multiple channels and webinar promotion tactics to maximize reach and connect with the widest possible audience.

According to our 2024 Webinar Marketing Report, social media and email are by far the best digital marketing channels for webinar promotion. In addition, about a third of respondents find partnership marketing and paid ads helpful for promoting webinars.

Send webinar reminders

Getting your target audience to register for your event and exceeding your registration goals is great. But don't assume that everyone who signed up for the event will actually attend.

To boost attendance, send webinar reminders via channels like email and social media. It's typically best to send a reminder the day before, the hour before, and then at the starting time.

Use our free webinar email templates to get standard language for these reminders. If you use Livestorm to host a webinar, you can easily plug in these templates and use our platform for reminder automation.

Follow up with registrants

After the event, send a follow up message to everyone who registered for the webinar. This is your chance to thank attendees for watching, share additional resources, or even send special offers.

You can also send a link to the on-demand recording. This way, attendees can watch again and registrants who missed it can view the webinar at their convenience.

Use automated marketing tools like Livestorm to simplify this process. If you record the events you host with Livestorm, you can automatically send links to on-demand webinars afterward.

Measure your webinar results

Once the event ends, take time to assess the results. Keep in mind that you don't necessarily have to track every metric. Instead, refer to the goals you set before the event to stay focused on what's important to your team.

Webinar software like Livestorm automatically tracks several important metrics, including:

• Registrants
• Attendees
• View duration
• Engagement like messages, questions, and polls

Compare the actual results to your KPIs. Then, use the insights to adjust your marketing campaigns as necessary for your next webinar.

Use our Video Engagement Score calculator to benchmark your results. It helps you assess how your webinars compare to others so you know where it would be helpful to improve.

Host an event debrief

After every webinar, hold a debrief session. Use the time to review results and discuss the outcomes.

Invite all webinar stakeholders to the event, including event planners, hosts, and marketing partners. Analyze the data and discuss the feedback from webinar attendees. During the webinar debrief, create a list of marketing efforts to continue doing, stop doing, and start doing for the next webinar.

5 Webinar promotion tactics to market your event

Leverage the webinar promotion tactics below to attract interest in your content and promote your online event.

1. Dedicated landing page

The easiest way to promote your event and collect attendee contact information is to set up a dedicated webinar registration page.

When you run a webinar with Livestorm, you can use our built-in registration page templates. In addition to sharing the event title, date, and description, the template includes a registration prompt for attendees.

You can also add a webinar promotion section to your website.

2. Email marketing

For most webinar marketers, email should be a top priority. "When done well, email is the most performing channel, with a catchy subject line, and clear value proposition in the body of the email," explains Pauline Mura, Livestorm Senior Marketing Partnerships Manager.

Livestorm's built-in marketing automation tools make email easy. You can email attendees from previous events to invite them to your newest webinar. And you can automatically send reminder emails afterward.

As we explain in our webinar promotion guide, it’s important to keep your webinar top of mind to boost attendance. We recommend sending email reminders beforehand and when the event goes live.

3. Partnership marketing

As helpful as email marketing can be for event promotion, it might not help you meet all webinar goals—such as lead generation.

"Email doesn't get you net new leads if this is what you're after," explains Pauline. “In this case, it’s more efficient to work with relevant partners or influencers aligned with your brand."

Our team frequently partners with complementary brands to host high-value webinars, like this one with guest speakers from Loom, UiPath, and Workable.

4. Social media promotion

Social media promotion is helpful for promoting your webinar to people who have already shown interest in your business. By sharing registration links on platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, you can improve awareness, drive registrations, and remind attendees.

For example, this Livestorm LinkedIn post promotes a panel discussion and invites followers to register for the live webinar.

5. Content repurposing

After the webinar ends, use the video content you created to develop more marketing materials. With content repurposing, you can turn live webinars into:

• Blog posts
• Short-form videos
• On-demand webinars
• Social media posts

Livestorm for webinar marketing

To host and promote successful events, you need the best webinar software. With Livestorm, you can host live webinars, engage with viewers in real time, and record events to offer as automated webinars later.

Our platform has built-in landing page and email marketing tools to make promotion simple. Plus, our software integrations let you connect existing tools to make marketing webinars even easier.

Ready to test our webinar platform for yourself? Sign up for a free Livestorm account and set up your first webinar in just a few minutes.