Webinar Marketing: Step-by-Step Guide to Promoting A Webinar

A webinar isn’t a webinar without an audience. So it goes without saying that if you’re hosting a webinar, marketing is absolutely essential. And we’re not just referring to promotion in the run-up to your webinar – you should also be marketing your recording as evergreen content after. Even if you’re an expert in planning, hosting, and recording your webinars, it doesn’t mean marketing is your forte. 

Here you’ll find all the tips and tricks you need to put together a compelling webinar marketing plan. 

What is webinar marketing?

Let’s start with the basics – what does webinar marketing actually consist of? 

Webinar marketing covers everything from social media promotion and newsletter marketing to word-of-mouth, press releases, and paid ads. Anything that promotes your upcoming webinar or points people to the evergreen recording counts as webinar marketing. 

Why is webinar marketing important?

Webinar marketing is the key to getting the audience numbers you need. Effective marketing will help you reach new viewers and drive your existing audience base to sign up. 

Once your live webinar is over, you can continue to benefit from it. Leverage your recording to produce evergreen content that continues to generate leads from your website. 

How to effectively create and market a webinar: 4 Steps

In this section, we’ll break down the steps to marketing and creating your webinar. 

Plan your webinar

The first step in creating a webinar is planning it: 

Plan thoroughly 

It might be tempting to jump ahead and get to the hosting stage.  But, thorough planning is the key to a smooth and successful webinar. Your webinar planning should involve:

• Detailed thought about which webinar software you’ll be using
• The contents of the event itself
• Logistical considerations such as date and time
• Marketing and promotion strategy
• Looking ahead to how you’re going to repurpose your content 

Consider your target audience 

You need to determine exactly who your target demographic is. We don’t just mean knowing who your audience are, but understanding them too.  This includes what they want to learn about, which social media platforms they tend to use, what kind of webinar will attract them – all of which is invaluable information that will help you build out a successful webinar. 

Choosing your hosting and recording platform 

Your choice of webinar hosting and recording platform can make or break your online event. Going for software that prioritizes recording quality, user experience, and offers intuitive tools to streamline your workflow is essential. You should make your decision well in advance of your actual webinar so that you have time to familiarize yourself with how everything works. 

Developing a marketing strategy 

One of the most important elements of your planning stage is the marketing strategy. Ultimately, your audience numbers will determine how effective your marketing efforts are. Some of the key considerations are: 

• Narrowing down your webinar branding and tone of voice
• Which marketing channels you’re going to use
• Your timings
• Your content format(s) 
• Whether you’re going to use paid advertising 

When it comes to the type of marketing strategies you want to implement you could include:

• Landing pages. Design an attention-grabbing landing page that you can use to encourage people to sign up and register for your webinar.
• Promotional social media clips. Short form video is all the hype. Create short teaser clips to post and promote your webinar on your socials.
• Newsletters. If you already have an on-going newsletter email list, market your webinar here to encourage your existing clientele to join.

And there’s a lot more, we’ve got a full guide on webinar promotion strategies to get you started.

Promote and market your webinar

Once you’ve nailed your webinar marketing strategy and chosen what type of promotion campaigns you’re going to use, you need to put it into action. 

Implementing your webinar marketing strategy 

All going well, your marketing strategy should be a well-oiled machine. You want to have your marketing materials and assets prepared ahead of time to minimize your stress. 

Creating multimedia promotional materials 

Make sure to create tailored promotional materials that appeal to your target audience and fit the platform you’re posting on. Remember to stick to your brand in both your visuals and language. 

Adapting your marketing strategy to each platform 

Though this requires extra effort, creating bespoke marketing materials for each platform will maximize your reach and exposure. 

Building momentum 

Timings are important when it comes to marketing. You want to try and build momentum in the lead-up to your event without oversaturating your feed or overwhelming your audience. That’s why fine-tuning your timings in response to how much traction and engagement you’re getting is so important. Your final push in the lead-up to your event is super important for pushing potential audience members to confirm their attendance. 

Hosting & recording your webinar  

On the day of your webinar, you want to minimize your workload and stress. 

Hosting and recording with Riverside 

Riverside is the obvious choice for hosting your webinar. Here’s why: 

• Record in up to 4k video and 48kHz audio. 
• Local recording means that Riverside records your remote guests on their own devices rather than over the internet. This means your wifi won’t impact your recording quality. 
• Record with up to 9 remote guests if you want to include other webinar co-hosts.
• Audience mode allows Webinar attendees to experience your webinar to the full without being included in the final recording 
• Live call-ins to make your audience experience more interactive. 
• Separate track recording for each participant’s audio, video and screen shares 
• Screenshare is easy and is automatically included in your final recording on a separate track 
• Media board lets you live mix during your webinar 
• Livestream to major platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Twitch.
• Accurate AI transcription in over 100 languages so that you can repurpose your webinar into written content 
• Add Automatic AI captions to your webinar recording to increase your reach when repurposing it
• Text-based editor lets you easily edit your recording using your transcript. This requires no-prior video editing experience. 
• AI Summary and description generator so you can post show notes and chapters effortlessly to YouTube or any online platform
• Magic clips identifies key segments in your webinar and converts these into short-form promotional videos 
• Easy and intuitive guest and host workflow for smooth experiences all round 
• Mobile app and browser based means you and your guests can join from whichever device is the most convenient. 
• Presentation recorder guarantees a high-quality recording track of any slides or screenshares that you want to be part of your recording 
• Teleprompter means you can upload your script beforehand and never skip a beat when you’re presenting your webinar
• Producer mode allows your technical team to control and monitor your recording session without being part of the recording. 

Start recording with Riverside

Easily record high-quality podcasts & videos remotely

Get Started

Here’s a quick step-by-step guide to hosting a webinar using Riverside: 

Step 1: Log in to your Riverside account and, if you haven’t already, create a new studio. You’ll need to give it a name and select your recording type. 

Step 2:  Adjust your settings so you can set up your live stream. To do this use the left studio panel and find your studio then click on the three dots next to it. Here, you’ll find the option to go to “Settings”.

In settings, go to the Livestream area if you’d like to stream to any platform. (You can check out our livestreaming guides for support).

In the settings tab you can also adjust your studio design, recording resolution, and more.

Step 3: Go to the Invite section in the settings tab, or if you’re back in the studio dashboard click “Invite” to send out invitations to guests and your audience.

Note: Make sure you select the right invite type. Guests are part of your recording and audience members just view your recording. 

Step 4: After all your settings are organized, click “Go to studio” to enter the studio.  You’ll see the green room where you can check your hair and makeup and add your name before clicking “Join Studio”. 

Step 5: Next, make sure any remote guests or co-hosts of your webinar have successfully joined your studio. If you haven’t shared the invite link with them yet, you can do so by clicking “Invite” on your top right.

Step 6: If you want to include a screen share in your webinar, head to the bottom of your screen in your studio, click "Share" and then select "Screen". You’ll be able to choose which part of your screen you want to share: a specific tab, window, or the entire screen.

If you are on the Teams plan, you can locally record your presentation using Riverside's Presentation recorder. You can find this  by clicking “Share” then “Presentation”.

Step 7: Finally, when everything is set up and good to go, you can hit the red record button and jump right in. 

Step 8: If you’re on a Pro or Business plan you can access live call ins as well. Your audience members will have to request to call in and you’ll simply have the option to accept or decline their call. (Learn more about managing live call-ins here.)

Step 9: When your session is over and you’ve wrapped your webinar, you can hit the red button at the bottom of your screen again and end the session. 

You’ll land back in your Riverside dashboard where your recordings will be waiting for you:

After the webinar 

You may think your work is done after your live webinar, but there’s lots more you can do.

Edit your recording & Transform your footage into evergreen content 

Don’t abandon your webinar recording just yet. With a bit of editing, it can become effective evergreen content that continues to attract new views. Riverside makes editing super easy and quick so you don’t have to worry about spending too much time on getting it ready for publication.  

Our text-based video editor works with AI transcriptions so trimming your recording is as easy as deleting text. You can then generate captions and customize your recording with your own background, layout and logo. 

It’s also possible to download SRT or TXT transcriptions which you can repurpose into a seo-driven blog post.

Create short-form clips 

Using Riverside’s Magic Clips AI tool you can quickly create short-form videos out of your full-length webinar recording. You can use these to market your webinar recording or repurpose them as promotional assets for future events that you host. 

Bonus: Best practices for marketing and hosting your webinar

Here are some tips and best webinar practices to hosting and marketing your webinar for the best results:

Promote on social media channels your audience visits

Social media should be at the heart of your webinar marketing strategy. Across all the various platforms, you have the ability to connect with expansive numbers of people – all of whom could be potential audience members. It’s good to focus your energies on social platforms your target audience demographic tends to use, though it’s worth promoting your webinar across all of them. You should also ensure to tailor your content to each platform’s formatting and trends. So for instance, creating short-form clips for Instagram and TikTok that subscribe to current trends. 

Send newsletters to target previous attendees

Make the most of your email marketing database and make sure to create a newsletter marketing campaign. Just one email isn’t enough – make sure to stagger your reminders all the way up to your event. 

Work with word-of-mouth 

Don’t underestimate the power of word of mouth when it comes to marketing your webinar. Ask those around you – your friends, family, and colleagues to spread the work plus share your upcoming webinar with their networks. 

Prioritize quality 

Never compromise on recording or streaming quality. Low-quality webinars can really let down your overall brand and negatively impact your audience’s experience. Opt for software like Riverside that prioritizes recording quality so that you never have to worry about it. Plus, with a high-quality recording, you can rest assured that your webinar can become an evergreen piece of content that will continue to drive traffic to your site and create leads. 

Don’t forget user experience

When it comes to webinars, your audience is your most precious asset. So their overall workflow and experience should be on your priority list. You want to avoid using software that’s difficult to navigate, slow to load, or clunky to use. Choosing a platform like Riverside that offers a seamless and intuitive user experience will elevate the overall production value of your webinar, resulting in better reviews and happier attendees. 

FAQs on Webinar Marketing

What are the 4 marketing channels for promoting a webinar?

When it comes to marketing a webinar, you want to reach as many people as possible. The channels you should be promoting your event on could include: 

• Social media 
• Email 
• Blog and/or website
• Podcast

What is a webinar strategy?

A webinar strategy encompasses your entire plan of action on how you’re going to attract audience members to sign up and attend your webinars. A webinar strategy usually consists of a marketing and promotion plan alongside a thorough event-planning workflow, and then analytics to understand how your event performed.