Promoting Webinars With LinkedIn Ads

Promoting webinars with LinkedIn ads might not be the obvious choice so ‘How do I get new contacts registered for my webinar?’ is often the biggest webinar conundrum.

One possible answer is to run ads. For niche and interest-based webinar topics, the place to go is usually Facebook. But for business topics, it could be LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is usually the most expensive of all the ad platforms. You can’t play small. Throwing a few hundred dollars at it might get you twenty clicks, which likely won’t prove very much.

Promoting Webinars With LinkedIn Ads

So you WILL need a budget (maybe $3-5K or so). You’ll also need a HOT webinar topic. Business webinars about ‘how to grow your business’ are ten a penny on LinkedIn. Your webinar MUST offer a solution to a potentially expensive problem that is already on people’s minds, and a solution they aren’t easily finding elsewhere.

(Think: what expensive problems can you solve quickly? What problems are your audience struggling to find answers to?)

You might not get the topic right out of the gate. You might need to test a few different webinar topics.

There are then a few different approaches you can take with the ads…

1. One is to run a 1-2 minute webinar trailer video for new prospects. This trailer video should be you talking to the camera, where you exasperate the problem. Build a list of people who watch the trailer video, then show them a single image remarketing ad encouraging them to register. Make sure the ad stresses scarcity in some way. (Limited dates, limited places, etc.)
2. Another approach is to try LinkedIn’s ‘lead form’ ads, which let people register through a LinkedIn hosted form where the contact’s details are prefilled. This only works if you are running a single webinar date (so probably a live webinar), and you’ll need Zapier to sync your LinkedIn registrants over to your webinar provider.
3. A third approach is to use sponsored messaging ads to send messages to people’s inboxes. In theory, this should work well, but in practice, I’ve seen better results from approaches 1 and 2. Still, it might be worth testing.

Targeting Your LinkedIn Ads

Targeting relevant LinkedIn groups can be a good idea, as people only usually join a LinkedIn group when they are genuinely interested in a topic.

Out of the three options above, and without knowing anything else about your business, I’d try option 1 first (single video engagement campaign, followed by a single image conversion campaign).

It’s also worth monitoring any engagement on the ad. Obviously delete any comments that are rude or disparaging (this happens less than on Facebook, but it still happens). But starting a manual interaction with the people who show interest in your ads is a great way to boost your results.

If the thought of logging into LinkedIn 7 times a day to do this makes you want to take a cold shower, have a colleague or virtual assistant do it instead.

Have you ever run LinkedIn ads to promote a webinar? I’d love to know what ads strategy you followed, and whether it was worthwhile for you.

And if you have a LinkedIn advertising budget and you’d like to discuss promoting webinars with LinkedIn ads, click this link to book a quick call.