One of the biggest challenges in arranging a webinar is attracting an audience. Here is a selection of ideas that can help:
- Identify your target audience and try to use the channels they prefer. Contact trade journals, news sites, blogs, find relevant newsletters, Facebook/LinkedIn or Google+ communities and post information there.
- Focus on the value of attending the webinar. What is the objective of the webinar and how will it help the participants in their daily work? What important issues will be dealt with? How can the participant get involved?
- In social media it can be wise to inform several times, preferably with a slightly different message each time. Try to provide some food for thought each time.
- Create a teaser in the form of a short video or poll to awaken interest in your event.
- Invite people to join a pre-webinar discussion in your Facebook group or other community.
- You can invite participants to brainstorm key questions in advance by using a tool like Tricider. Here they can suggest questions or key issues, offer advantages and disadvantages and vote on the best ones. In this way you ensure that the questions raised in the webinar are genuine.
- At the end of your webinar invite participants to continue the discussion in a Facebook/Google+/LinkedIn group. This means that your event becomes a community.
- Send a link of the recorded webinar to all registered participants and invite them all to join the post-webinar discussion.
Effective Webinars 