Attracting the Right Audience to Your Web Event

Web seminars are becoming increasingly popular way for Sales and Marketing teams to drive high quality leads at a lower cost. Unlike other e‐marketing tools, web seminars enable you to come as close as possible to an in‐person tradeshow or event, without incurring the cost of travel and event management. But given the fact that most of your target audience may be accustom to in‐person events, how can you ensure that youll attract the right audience to your next web seminar?

Here are some simple steps you can follow that will help ensure that you attract the right audience to your next web seminar:

1. Find out where your target audience lives online
   One of the key aspects of attracting the right audience to your web seminar is to understand what types of information and resources they may be accessing online today. By doing a little research, you should be able to easily find the right online publications, associations and search engine key words that theyre using to find the most recent and relevant information about the industry. Once youve indentified the online trusted information sources, you have found the where your audience lives online which is right where youll want to target your web seminar marketing activities. Those who are gathering information and resources online are more likely to be receptive to register for and attend a web seminar.
2. Partner with a trusted industry expert or association
   In order to attract registrants for your event you need to have credibility. With an in‐person tradeshow or event, this is typically built‐in because the event is usually run by an industry association or analyst. Unless your company is extremely well known as an industry thought leader, you need to partner organization to add credibility to your web seminar invitation and topic. This will increase the likelihood that your target audience will register and attend.
3. Choose a hot topic
   Make sure you choose a topic for your seminar that is timely and relevant to your target audience. If its a new industry trend or providing information about an existing market dynamic in a different way, its more likely to spur interest from your target audience, resulting in higher registration and attendance.
4. Create a targeted email and landing page
   Once youve determined your topic and speaker be sure that your promotion email and landing environment reflect the key points that your attendees will learn. Make sure that you and your partner organizations brands are well represented along with any other imagery that supports your topic. Registration questions should be limited to the key pieces of information that your organization needs to successfully conduct an initial follow‐up with an attendee. You want to make it as easy as possible for attendees to learn about the value of your seminar and quickly complete the registration process.
5. Post seminar follow‐up with attendees
   After your seminar is over youll want to send a follow‐up email to your attendees thanking them for their participation. You should also email those who registered and did not attend and invite them to view a recording of the session on‐demand. You should also conduct a brief survey with both the group who attended and the group that did not. Answers to your survey questions give you the opportunity to uncover demographic data along with levels of interest in specific topic areas that may be more effective at capturing your target audience in the future.

Hopefully these five tips give you a good sense for how to attract the right audience to a web seminar. The more you use web seminars as a part of your sales, marketing and training initiatives, the better youll get at it and the more your audience will become accustomed to expecting excellent information to be provided in this format.