This is not a clickbait - Here's how to get 250+ guests for your next webinar without budget

Whenever marketers say that they don't know how to get participants to attend their virtual events, it's usually a reflection of their lack of insight into their target audience.

• "We don't know how to get participants to attend a virtual event." 

• "We can't deliver the kind of value our members need in a virtual environment"

• "Our audience isn't interested in virtual events."

• "We can't afford to run virtual events."

According to Wild Apricot, these are some of the reasons businesses that didn't conduct online events gave. 

A virtual event is usually organized to achieve two major goals; create awareness and generate leads. Every other objective falls under those two broad categories. Virtual events are one of the easiest ways to create awareness and generate leads for your startup, especially if you work for an early-stage or bootstrapped startup. 

If you tick all the right boxes, you may be able to get up to 250 people to register to attend your virtual event without running ads. That's free semi-cold 250 leads to retarget later on. Let's get into how you can do this every month with a 70% guaranteed success rate.

Marketletic recently published a report stating that most companies allocate between 10-20% of their marketing budget to virtual events. Your virtual events allocation goes directly to paying for Zoom or any other virtual event hosting platform if you are a marketer working for a startup with limited funding. This means that the only way to get people to attend your event is to market to them organically. And to do this successfully, you need to be clever in your approach.

The psychology of virtual events

Whenever marketers say that they don't know how to get participants to attend their virtual events, it's usually a reflection of their lack of insight into their target audience. The first step to getting people to attend your event is answering the question of 'where can I find my primary, secondary, and tertiary target audience?'

Let's assume you lead marketing for a B2B startup. Your top of funnel or primary target audience would typically be the CEO or the decision-maker of the companies in the industry you're targeting - the person that signs the cheque. Your secondary target audience may be mid-level executives, while your tertiary target audience may be software engineers or sales executives, depending on your product or the service you're rendering. 

If it was me, I wouldn't focus on getting the decision-makers to attend my event. CEOs don't have the time to register for webinars, let alone join one and listen to a group of people talk for one hour. Your efforts should be targeted mainly at your tertiary target audience while extending your reach to your secondary target audience. These people are more likely to register and attend your event.

Now let's cut to the chase. How do you get 250 people or more to register for your webinar?

The tools you will need:

1. Social media accounts: LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram

2. Scrabin

3. Clicktotweet

4. Typeform

In my previous article, I wrote about the importance of having a guest for your webinar. I'll drill down on this a bit. You're a startup with little traction and less than 2500 followers across social media platforms. 

If you decide to be the guest and host of your webinar, your chances of connecting with a new audience and generating leads is close to zero. But when you host it with someone outside your organization, you gain access to new territories. What do I mean?

How to choose a guest for your webinar

Assumptions: 

• You are putting together a webinar for Digital, Growth, and Content Marketers. 

• Your startup is like Canva, but faster, cheaper and better - (All the best competing with Canva though 😄). 

• You work for a Nigerian startup

• Your startup has 1200 followers on Twitter, 700 on Instagram, and 510 on LinkedIn.

• You plan to retarget these people after the webinar.

How would I choose a guest if I was in charge?

I would go on Twitter and search for marketers in Nigeria who are active on Twitter with 5k - 10k followers. I wouldn't go for marketers with more than 10k followers yet because they might have pivoted into micro influencers that need to be paid to be guests. 

I'll leverage my network to reach these people. Here's an example:

(PS: I didn't research the type of people that follow them. You want to reach people that are followed and respected by your target audience) 

I would reach out to both Sheun Adeola and Teju Adeyinka because they are more likely to say Yes than Harri Obi. I wouldn't reach out to Olusotan to be my guest even though he seems like the perfect person based on his brand. He doesn't seem to have the 'clout' to pull lots of people.

But what I would do is start a relationship with him by engaging with his tweets. In the future, I would consider pairing him with a more prominent speaker. By more prominent, I mean someone with more followers and engagement.

Another Assumption: Teju Adeyinka has agreed to be a guest. Now let's think of a topic - You should have done this before approaching anyone to be a guest at your webinar.

How to choose a webinar topic

You need to answer two questions for you to choose a topic that would make people want to attend your webinar: (i) Who are the people I'm trying to reach? (ii) What problems do they have that your webinar is positioned to solve? 

Note that the focus is on the problem that attending your webinar can solve, not your product.

For our target audience, a good problem would be How to grow your company's social media pages organically.  But would I use this topic on the flier? Nah! Here's why:

• The topic sounds like a blog post that no one reads because it gives the same generic advice about having content calendars, etc.

• The topic sounds like the speaker will be talking about things they googled

• The topic makes you look like an authority in a space where you aren't

A better topic would be: 'How I grew Buycoin's social media following to 15k+ in 9 months.' Why would I use this topic? 

• People love to learn on a personal level - they want to know the exact things you did to achieve a particular result so that they can replicate it.

• The topic positions your speakers as an authority with a social proof.

• The topic speaks directly to the pain point of your target audience.

Now that you have your topic and your guest, what's next? 

Registration form - Typeform

I stopped using Google form a while ago and switched to Typeform because of one feature: auto-redirect on completion. This feature automatically redirects your respondents to your landing page or website as soon as they submit your Typeform. But when people register for your webinar on Typeform, you won't redirect them to your landing page. You'll redirect them to Twitter using a tool called Clicktotweet

Clicktotweet (CTT)

Clicktotweet is a website that automatically generates links for users to share content through their own Twitter accounts. What you want to do on CTT is create a link that people who register for your webinar will be automatically redirected to. 

Still confused about how CTT works? Click here, and you'll be redirected to your Twitter page to tweet something I already prepared for you. What if we could prompt everyone that registers to attend our webinar to tweet about it? That's why you need Typeform and Clicktotweet.

A sample tweet I would prepare on clicktotweet would be something like this: 

Hi guys! I just signed up to attend a Webinar organized by (insert company handle). I'm looking forward to listening to the guest - (insert guest's handle) as he/she/they talks about 'How they grew Buycoin's social media following to 15k+ in 9 months.' Register here >>> (insert registration link)

After preparing your tweet, you generate a link and input the link as the destination you want people to be redirected to once they register on Typeform.

Disclaimer: I don't know if there are Twitter rules against promotions like this. But I've never gotten into any trouble with it.

What does this mean for you in the long run?

It means that for every 10 people that register, at least 4 people will tweet about it. And out of those 4 people that tweeted, you should get at least 1 new person to sign up to attend your webinar. With Typeform and Clicktotweet, you would have created some sort of viral loop that doesn't require you to do anything.

Where does LinkedIn come in?

LinkedIn is one the easiest places to target niche audiences. I wonder why many people underestimate it. I think people have demonized outbound marketing and cold outreaches. But you need LinkedIn if you want to target a niche audience.

Back to our startup - we want to reach marketers. There are two ways to go about reaching out to people on LinkedIn.

1. Organic Outreach

You can easily do this by searching for people on LinkedIn and filtering your search based on your target audience. Then you'd view their profiles and send connecting requests to them while attaching a 300-word pitch inviting them to attend your webinar. It's stressful. This is why I prefer the second option

2. Automated Outreach

Before I dive into this, I'd love to inform you that your LinkedIn account could get suspended if you use automation tools on the platform. But a way to avoid that is to upgrade to LinkedIn premium. You'll be safe.  There are numerous tools for LinkedIn automations, but one of the best ones out there is Srabin. Scrabin is a lead generation tool that helps automate all your LinkedIn outreach. So, if you wanted to reach out to marketers on LinkedIn, Scrabin would search for them, view their profiles, send a connection request and a message. All you have to do is set it up in less than 30 minutes.

I would advise that you keep your pitch to 300 characters as LinkedIn doesn't permit you to send more than that when sending out a connection request. Here's a template for you to play around with:

Hi {name}, Sorry I had to message you out of the blue. I viewed your profile, and I am amazed at how much skill you have. I'd love to invite you to a 30 min Webinar about (insert webinar topic). It's scheduled to hold (insert date). Register here: (insert registration link)

The beauty of this is that everyone who registers using the Typeform link is automatically redirected to Twitter to tweet about the webinar for you. 

If you do this well, in addition to other amazing strategies, you should be able to get more than 250 people to register for your webinar. Those are leads that you can place in a funnel and retarget later on.

Here are some extra tips:

• Design a flyer so good that your guest and other people would be proud to share

• Prepare email reminder sequences for respondents

• Send an automated confirmation email to every respondent

• Get your respondent to add your webinar to their calendar

• Prepare a post-webinar outreach plan and repurpose your webinar recording

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PS: You can reply to this email if you have questions. I respond to every email. See you next Thursday!