Better late than never: how could you advertise an on-demand webinar?

In a survey reported by a Business Wire-published press release in June, 99% of marketers deemed webinars crucial to their plans, while 72% credited webinars with directly impacting pipeline and revenue. Given these statistics, we shouldn’t be surprised that webinar usage has soared recently.

The ON24 Webinar Benchmarks Report 2021, for which over 100,000 digital experiences from last year were analyzed, claims that the usage of webinars grew by 162% during 2020, with webinar attendance quadrupling. However, the success of a webinar can depend heavily on its availability.

When is the best time to hold a webinar?

Judging from research in which the webinar expert Daniel Waas participated, webinars scheduled for 11am, 1pm or 2pm tend to spur relatively high numbers of registrations. The day of the webinar is a crucial factor, too – with Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays leading to many registrations.

However, what if your schedule just doesn’t allow you to deliver a webinar live at a popular time? Even if this is one worry you don’t actually have, many people interested in attending your webinar as a live event might not be able to do so due to scheduling conflicts.

Situations like these probably help to explain why, according to the ON24 report, almost half of all attendees at webinars last year watched them on-demand. Hence, it’s good practice to make a webinar available on-demand shortly after delivering it live. So, if you do go down this route, how can you effectively publicize the webinar’s on-demand availability? 

Let people know that even your on-demand webinar is interactive

Once the live stream of your webinar has stopped, you should send all of its registrants – yes, even those who failed to actually turn up on the big day – a recording of the event.

As you use a promotional email to advertise this webinar’s on-demand version, you should reassure the email’s recipients that most interactive tools – like live chat and polls – built into the webinar will still work with its recorded iteration. On-demand viewers will still be able to receive answers to their questions – it’s just that those answers won’t arrive in real time. 

Use social media to draw attention to the webinar

Maybe a week after the webinar has finished, you could mention it on your brand’s social media feeds, using a call to action (CTA) like ‘Watch now’ to tempt people into clicking links to the webinar.

To avoid coming across as overly pushy, you could mention the webinar somewhat informally, or as part of a broader conversation about a subject related to that of the webinar.

Create blog posts and infographics summing up the webinar

Your webinar might have explored many different themes – in which case, for each of those themes, you could write a dedicated blog post with the webinar linked to in the sidebar. Another idea is to use a single blog post to summarize everything the webinar touched upon. Make this blog content suitable even for people who might initially respond to it by wondering: “What is a webinar?”