MBA2341 Q&A Wednesday: How much time do I need to promote my webinar?

0:09Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show, the business podcast you can count on for practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. I'm also the co-founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started back in 2014. And today's episode is Q &A Wednesday. On Q &A Wednesdays, I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you've got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net. Today's question is from David, and David asks, Hey Omar, I'm running my first webinar to sell my product. I'm just wondering, how much time do I need to promote my webinar?

0:47A few days? A few weeks? I'm not really sure. Great question, David. I got you, David. I got your back. I've run over 500 webinars, so I know what works, what doesn't, and how long you need to promote your webinar. Does it matter what the webinar is about or the frequency of the webinar? We're going to get into all those details to make sure that you get the best chance of getting the most attendees on your webinar. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Webinars, of course, are a great way for you to be able to sell your products. Basically, it's a way for you to build trust with your audience, a way for you to be able to present your products, answer questions, help people make the decision to buy from you.

1:25It's the closest thing that you can get to having a discussion in person. In other words, it's a sales process. It's a way for you to be able to close more sales. But in today's Q &A Wednesday's question, we want to make sure we know how long we need to promote our webinar. So if I've created a webinar for a certain date, how early do I need to start promoting? Now, some people might say the earlier the better. I'm here to tell you, no, the data shows that that's not true. Too early is a thing. You can actually promote too early. And in fact, promoting too late is less disastrous than too early.

2:00So if you're running a live webinar for the first time, and maybe this is not a regular thing, this is like a one-off type of situation where you're doing some part of promotion or a launch or something like that, and you don't plan on doing another live webinar in maybe some time, then you do want to give some time for people to put in their calendar. So I would say a maximum of two weeks in advance. I've tested a lot of different ways to promote webinars. In my opinion, the sweet spot is around eight days. Eight days in advance, you can then send a reminder when there's four days away, then you can send another reminder when it's two days away, then the day before, then the day of.

2:36The point here is that most people will be able to put something in their calendar when they have one week's notice. Ten days or eight days gives you a little bit more wiggle room. Two weeks is kind of the maximum. Most people have a hard time even thinking beyond two weeks and probably might ignore it and say, I don't know if I'll be busy then or what I'm doing in two weeks. And unless your webinar is really compelling, like, oh, I better register because I really want to attend this, then it's a little bit too early. So I like to, again, hover around 10 to eight days. If it's a one-off kind of launch event.

3:11and those initial emails are just kind of like heads up. We're having this big event, this live webinar where we're going to be doing XYZ. Mark your calendars. This is the day you can register here. Very subtle, very light. And then as you get closer and closer, you sell the webinar more and more. Why they should attend, what they're going to miss out on if they don't go. What are some of the benefits of attending that they may have not thought of? Who else is attending? Whatever it might be. The point here is that you want to really start selling it as you get closer and closer. And of course, you don't need to send these emails to anybody who's registered already.

3:44Now, we talked about a one-off kind of launch situation, but if you're running a webinar regularly, which I recommend because it's a great way to have reoccurring sales, for example, doing a live webinar to sell your product every two weeks, and you know, you kind of have a standing webinar. Every two weeks, there's a chance for you to register and learn about your product, to get a demo, to ask questions. In this case, you don't need that much advance warning because again, you can't bombard your email list so much with emails, as well as the fact that in another two weeks, you're gonna be sending them the same email if they haven't attended one yet.

4:17So in this case, four working days is actually pretty solid in my experience. So say for example, you run a webinar every other Thursday. So twice a month, every two weeks on a Thursday, you run a webinar. Then that means the Friday before you can send your first email invite to your webinar and then Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then the day of the webinar on Thursday. This is totally fine and enough warning, especially for the fact that in about another week, they're gonna get a reminder or an email if they haven't attended a webinar yet about your next webinar, because every two weeks, and it was the Friday before that you have invited them.

4:53And that cadence is totally fine. The one thing I recommend is that in your webinar software, you know, shameless plug, if you wanna use a webinar software, that's brilliant. It's called Webinar Ninja. It's my webinar software. But in your webinar software, you should tag when somebody registers on your email list. So for example, if you're using ConvertKit, you want to tag them that they've registered to one of your sales webinars so that you don't re-invite them to a webinar they've already registered for. Again, you're only inviting people that have never registered for a webinar. If they've already registered to a webinar, awesome.

5:21You may want to re-invite them a month down the line or two months down the line if they want to attend again. This is why when I tag anybody, I tag them with a unique tag that indicates which webinar they went on. And usually it's just the date. I say like, you know, February 5th, 2023 live webinar. And that's a tag. And I know that they registered for that webinar on that date. And then when I send invites, I can just make sure I don't send anybody an invite in February that has that tag. Because obviously you want to be kind to your subscribers and not bombard them with too many emails. Remember your emails that you're sending out, it's not just your webinar invite, it's also your newsletter and your updates and other promotions.

6:03The thing to remember about inviting and promoting your webinar to your email list or on social media or with ads, this is not really a sell, so to speak, meaning that you're not asking them to pay money. You're not giving them an opportunity to buy a product. This is actually a chance for them to enjoy some useful content. It's a freebie. So you have a little bit more leeway when it comes to promotion. Now, when it comes to paid ads, One of the strategies I highly recommend that works for me and a lot of our users is retargeting or remarketing ads. This is the type of ad that gets shown to people that have been on your website before.

6:40This is low-hanging fruit or people that are warm, people that are familiar with your product. They know who you are. Running ads to just people that have been on your website are the easiest way to get a low cost per conversion and a great way for you to get some branding and some marketing out there on the internet. It's not going to cost you a lot of money because you're not marketing to everybody under the sun that's interested in your product. You're just marketing to people that have been to your website before. It's a smaller pool, but it's a warmer lead and a higher chance for them to convert to register for something that they'd be interested in.

7:10Of course, you can run all kinds of ads and different kinds of audiences and reach out new audiences and lookalike audiences, all that kind of stuff. But the low hanging fruit is retargeting or remarketing ads that you can start with. I've personally done this with Facebook ads, with Instagram ads, and those are the two I really focus on because I'm able to easily deploy some great content, some great video snippets to tease the webinar, some good copy to attract people to register for the next webinar. The great thing is that when you're doing a reoccurring webinar, like I mentioned, like every two weeks, you create that content once, you create those ads once, the marketing materials, and you just run that play over and over again, week after week, bringing in new people.

7:49At some point, you're going to want to go beyond remarketing and start creating ads for newer people or people that haven't been to your website. And this is where I would say the next step is a lookalike audience, which is basically taking your email list right now, uploading it to Facebook. Facebook finds people that have similar likes and interests and behaviors as that list and start serving ads to those people. Now, I know we went down the ad route a little bit, but we are talking about promotion and I want to make sure that you have some options. so it's not just inviting your email list.

8:21You can also start doing these promotions 10 days, eight days out before your webinar. David, I hope that helped answer your question here on Q &A Wednesday. If you've got a question you wanna ask, you're listening right now and you're like, hey, I got a question for my business, for my situation, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net. I'll make sure to answer it right here on Q &A Wednesday. If you wanna keep it anonymous, just let me know in the email and I'll make sure that I answer your question and help everybody else who's listening with that answer. Don't forget to hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app right now on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, on Overcast, whatever it might be.

8:58That way you get the next episode automatically and you get access to over 2 ,300 episodes in our back catalog. Before I go, I wanna leave you with this. One of the things that I learned over the last 20 years of business and sales and marketing is that you're more likely to under-promote than to over-promote. Now, overpromotion is actually kind of hard to do. Most people underpromote, send not enough emails, do not enough ads, do less campaigns, less promotions, less offers, less sales. It's better for you to go overboard than to not do enough. You gotta remember, people need reminders. People are not opening every single email or not seeing every single ad you run or every single offer you give.

9:38Business is a contact sport. The more you contact people, the better your results. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Friday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.