Today I want to talk about webinars.
I love doing webinars myself and find them a really powerful way to connect with people and share what I do, and I’m also loving running webinars for clients, particularly the private fertility clinic Zita West.
Working with a clinic like Zita West is amazing (and everyone else at the clinic) because not only is it one of the top clinics in the country with some of the highest success rates, but they also love testing different aspects of online marketing.
Technically, I’m meant to be doing PR for Zita too, and certainly I manage incoming press enquiries. And we keep meaning to do more PR!
But with our webinars doing so well they are taking up all our focus.
Takeaway: it’s not all about mainstream media coverage. Sometimes other things are more effective
How do we fill the webinars?
Obviously if you’re going to run webinars, you need to fill them with people and we’ve been doing this via Facebook ads.
We’ve been getting up to 600 sign ups per webinar, with over half of registrants turning up live (this is great, the webinar average is around a third but when you have a super targeted subject like fertility hosted by someone well known like Zita it’s not surprising to get a higher than average turn out).
In total over 2000 people have signed up for our live webinars this year which has lead to thousands of pounds of sales of shop products, and new clients for the clinic.
We’ve also used Facebook ads to fill our open evenings at the clinic itself.
On this week’s webinar, we’re pushing towards even higher turn out by again using Facebook ads. This time, on the day of the webinar, we’re running Facebook ads to a custom list of those who have signed up reminding them the event starts at half 7 prompt – we know what life is like, you get busy, people forget, so we’re hoping this ad will make sure even more people turn up live.
We also ensure a high turnout rate by asking people to send their questions in advance. Not only does this help us prepare, but it means people know they will get personalised answers. And we get a lot of questions sent in in advance!
Takeaway: the more personalised you can be for the event, the higher the turn out rate
But what about our ad spend?
Well here’s the best news. In terms of ad spend, we are spending just 0.65p per acquisition, and around £5 per 1000 impressions.
This is really really low!
Our landing pages meanwhile convert at 39% (personally I always review the situation if a landing page conversion is below 25%).
The reason though that the price is low and the page conversion is high is because our marketing is largely targeted at warm audiences and our custom crowd, ie those people who have visited the website, engaged on social media, bought products, and are on our email list.
And far from overnight success, we’ve put a lot of effort into building our website traffic (which has almost tripled in the past 18 months), our social channels and our email list. So we have very large warm audiences we can market to.
This is one of the key reasons it’s important to write content for your website, keep publishing, keep on top of social media and build out your email list.
Takeaway: Work on custom audiences before you run Facebook ads
Whenever I think about this particular example of Facebook ads and why they work so efficiently, it is the same. It is because we have laid the foundations of building highly targeted custom audiences through blog content, SEO, email lists and social media versus jumping into Facebook ads and hoping for the best. Foundations first!
