An effective webinar promotion campaign will include both e-mail and social media marketing components. By combining methods you would be visible to a larger portion of your target market, which will increase the possible size of your webinar audience. Subsequently, a larger audience means an increased chance of customer conversion and sale of product or services.
When integrating marketing methods there are a few things you should keep in mind. First, both social media and e-mail have strengths and weaknesses. Neither is perfect, but integration of the methods allows you to play to both mediums strengths. Strength wise, both are cost effective channels that will deliver the message to your target market. Additionally, as Jim Ducharme wrote in his article Email vs. Social: Channels Aren’t Social, Humans Are, “The one strength they all share is that they allow us to socialize and interact on a global scale. Each has a task they are well suited for and while it makes sense to predict that at some point in the future, there will be some standardized channel which combines all these strengths; we are not there yet. And who cares if we are as long as we are talking?”
The greatest benefit of integration is that the difference between the two mediums will work to your advantage. This may sound confusing, but the simple fact is that some people prefer e-mail and some prefer social media. By using both methods you are allowing the audience to choose the one they are more comfortable with. Integration helps you avoid turning off potential webinar audience members by using a method they may not respond to.
Frequency can be a challenge for both e-mail and social media marketing. You don’t want to over promote with either medium. In either case it can be difficult to determine how often to send the message out. With e-mail it is best to start a few weeks before the webinar and to keep a few days between each touch point. You can always increase the time between the e-mails once the date of the webinar gets closer.
Frequency , in social media, is a whole other beast to tackle. Social media works faster than e-mail and messages have a much smaller window of opportunity to be seen. This window of opportunity depends on which social channel you are using, how many followers/fans you have, and how many connections those you’re a messaging have. By monitoring your messages and seeing how long they remain relevant you will be able to tell when it is time to send the message again. You could be sending out messages as often as every day if you have a large audience you are trying to reach. This is something you’ll have to test and learn along the way.
When integrating social media and e-mail a key to success of both is relevance. Sending the wrong message to your target audience or the right message to the wrong people will shut down your campaign before it has a chance. That is why researching your contacts is a vital part in both e-mail and social media marketing. Think about who your target audience is and what is important to them and craft the message around that. If you can’t do that, then either the material is wrong for the audience or vice versa.
In the end, a successful promotion in either medium depends upon one thing: a compelling message. This can be hard with either social media or e-mail. It can be extremely challenging to write a persuasive message in 140 characters. This is where integration comes in handy, use those 140 characters to get people to the longer message that will convince them to register for your webinar. Conversely, you may be able to aptly persuade a person with a short post rather than with a longer e-mail message. It really depends on the person writing the message and the subject of that message, which is why having both mediums available is truly an advantage.
As a last note, remember when it comes to e-mail marketing please make sure your messages are CAN-Spam compliant!
For more information I recommend: Eight Best Practices in Webinar Audience Recruitment By Mike Agron and Bret Smith, Co-Principals, WebAttract https://webattract.com/docs/8_best_practices_in_webinar_audience_recruitment.pdf