10 Easy Ways to Promote Your Webinar on LinkedIn

For any webinar you host that’s targeted at a B2B audience, LinkedIn should be part of your promotion plan.

On average, 46% of B2B social media traffic comes from LinkedIn. B2B marketers are tapping into LinkedIn’s network of millions of professionals to generate serious demand. Between organic posts, audience targeting, and new advertising features, LinkedIn can help you make sure your next webinar is packed with the high-quality attendees I know you want.

Here are 10 easy ways to promote your webinar on LinkedIn:

1. Create the necessary assets

Before we get to the fun stuff, make sure you’ve covered the basics. You’ll need a landing page that tells your audience why they should register and provides a preview of what they’ll learn.

Add a personal touch by including your panelists’ head shots along with a short bio - especially if they are industry influencers or represent a well-known brand. Show them off and take advantage of their clout and credibility!

Take a look at this example of GoToWebinar customer, Unbounce, using a video teaser, speaker bios, and a brief to drive registrations:

2. Promote with Linkedin Updates

With a high-converting landing page ready to compel people to register, it’s time to get the word out. Create custom images to use for promoting your webinar on social media and specifically, LinkedIn. Images help attract eyeballs and more registrations over text-only posts.

Canva is a great tool to quickly put together a custom image and render it in the various sizes each social channel requires. I created the hero image for this post using Canva, which automatically gave me the right image dimensions for LinkedIn.

At least three weeks before your webinar, start posting LinkedIn Updates. Keep your titles and descriptions concise but compelling. Titles should be a maximum of 70 characters while descriptions can be up to 600.

3. Make it easy for your team and partners to promote

Create a few sample LinkedIn Updates promoting your webinar, and encourage your team to share on their personal LinkedIn profiles. This can be especially effective for your sales reps, who should already be using LinkedIn as a channel for prospecting.

If you’ve teamed up on your webinar with an influencer or partner, take full advantage of their promotional reach. Make sure your partners have the right messaging, landing page links, and images so they can promote on their personal profiles and company LinkedIn pages as well. 

Here’s an example of our partner, ActiveDemand, promoting a joint webinar we did in March.

Share the love and showcase your partner’s best practices. It’s a great way to recognize them, and the partner mentions often lead to additional social shares that help amplify your voice.

4. Spread the word in relevant LinkedIn Groups

Don’t be that person and flood your groups with spammy, self-promoting posts. However, if you’re an active group member and you’re hosting a relevant webinar, it’s okay to share and let everyone know why you think they would benefit from attending.

5. Share related content

Closely align your webinar and content strategy so that you have multiple content pieces available around a common topic. Share relevant content in the form of blog posts, infographics, or videos to help create noise around your webinar. Embed a CTA for your webinar in your content and then share away on LinkedIn and other social media platforms. Or post content directly to other publishing platforms - including LinkedIn. Oh hey, kind of like this article!

And if you do publish on LinkedIn, don’t forget to feature that post on your company and showcase pages.

6. Use Sponsored Updates

Now it’s time to put some money behind your updates to boost visibility beyond your immediate followers. When sponsoring updates, choose the posts that performed best organically. Then be sure to use LinkedIn’s targeting options so the right audience sees your update. Linkedin allows you to target audiences based on attributes like location, skills, job titles, member groups, and more. See this example of how we promoted our upcoming LinkedIn webinar through a sponsored update.

7. Try LinkedIn Ads

Unlike sponsored updates, which appear in a user’s feed, LinkedIn Ads appear in the sidebar on the right side of the screen. They are priced on a CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per impression) basis. Ads can get pricey, so if you’re new to LinkedIn advertising, start off with a small test budget.

8. Increase Registration Rate with Linkedin Lead Forms

To maximize your registration rate, consider using LinkedIn’s brand new Lead Gen Forms with your ads and sponsored content. Simply include your webinar call-to-action on your ad. When a user clicks the CTA, they’ll see a form already populated with their information that was pulled from their LinkedIn profile. When they submit, you’ll receive their information, and they’ll be registered for your webinar.

It’s also a very user-friendly experience for anyone who's on their phone and doesn’t want to fill in a form on a tiny touchscreen with fat thumbs. Plus, you’ll benefit from getting accurate lead information. It’s a win-win.

Want to learn more about how that works? Zapier has just released an integration between the LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms and GoToWebinar and we've been heavily experimenting with it over the past few weeks. We're co-hosting a webinar next Tuesday, July 18, where we’ll share everything we’ve learned in an epic live workshop - down to the exact number of registrations we drove. Come join the fun!

9. Measure success and optimize

Once your webinar is over -- and you’ve generated a ton of new leads! -- it’s time to measure success. Make sure to track all your promotional efforts so you can see how your channels and campaigns stack up against each other. Look at how many registrants each channel and campaign drove, then follow those registrants through the entire customer journey to see which efforts drive leads that turn into customers.

An easy way to track registrants from LinkedIn is to use tracking parameters (or UTM parameters) in the links you use in your promotions and content.

Once you’ve analyzed your results, optimize your efforts for your next webinar. Find ways to tweak and improve your audience targeting, creative, posting times, ad types, and more. 

10. Keep promoting once the webinar is over

Don’t let all your hard work go to waste once your webinar is over. If you’ve recorded it, continue to promote an on-demand version. Just change your CTAs from “Register Now” to “Watch Now.” For inspiration check out this channel showcasing my team’s latest webinars on webinars (very meta, I know :-).

Bonus: Try other Linkedin Advertising options

LinkedIn provides a lot of powerful advertising tools so don’t be afraid to test them out. There’s Sponsored InMail and Web Retargeting if you’re not afraid to spend a little money. When you consider the high ROI of webinars, it just might be worth it.

__________________________________________________________________________

Over the past few years, I've put on over 500 webinars and had a chance to analyze more than half a million sessions run on the big webinar platforms. That ended up turning me into a webinar expert and has led to speaking engagements at events like INBOUND and on podcasts like MarketingProfs.

Now I’m on a mad mission to end all dull webinars by sharing the best of what I've learned so you can skip the learning curve and turn your webinars into an instant hit. Read my favorite webinar tips on my blog or take a look at the webinar consulting services I offer.

Outside work, I'm a geek at heart who loves LEGO, sci-fi and the occasional video game. If talking B2B for hours is your thing please get in touch with me here on LinkedIn or on Twitter.

__________________________________________________________________________