Having been in the email marketing space for 20 years and also having delivered 300 webinars the last 15 years, I’ve noticed a parallel between the two channels.
Marketers tend to spend 98% of their time focused on the email/webinar process and content but then give the email subject line or webinar title minimal thought and effort. And often it is the last thing done before pressing send or taking the webinar registration page live.
Both subject lines and webinar titles are critical to capturing attention and motivating people to want to learn more. An email subject line must motivate recipients to open the email to learn more. And the webinar title motivates people to click through from social media, a blog post, or an email, or to take the second step to read the description on the registration page.
Over the years I’ve discovered that people are often so busy and in a hurry that they will frequently make the decision whether to register or not for a webinar based entirely or mostly on the title (after reading the title they might scan the description, especially bullet points).
Following are 13 tips for writing good webinar titles:
- Start writing titles early in the webinar planning process. It will help bring clarity to the speakers and topic description.
- Focus the title on the benefits of attending.
- Don’t worry about title length, but rather clarity and enough information to create interest and resonate with your audience.
- Use action words.
- When it makes sense, use numbers in the title. Such as “7 Tips,” “9 Mistakes,” “5 Rules …”
- Use intrigue when it makes sense to motivate readers to want to discover the answers and solutions to their problems and challenges. Using “FOMO” – the fear of missing out – can work especially well to create buzz around your webinar title and topic on social media.
- Make sure the title resonates directly with your target audience – so they immediately go “aha, that’s a topic I’m interested in.”
- Be careful using buzzwords and acronyms, unless the are widely known and used by your core target audience. On the other hand, using certain acronyms, for example, might filter out people who if they don’t know the meaning, may not be in your target market.
- When appropriate, tie the title to current events, issues, and trends.
- Find a unique angle that helps your webinar “pop” and stand out from the competition. For example, there may be some new regulations coming into effect in your industry and all of your competitors are doing webinars on what it means and how to prepare. If your competitors are all focused on negatives of the new regulations, perhaps find a positive aspect to highlight.
- Compare the draft description to your draft titles. Are the titles and description in sync and do they support each other? If the title makes promises that the description doesn’t support, you’ll need to revise one or both of them.
- Write a few drafts of the webinar title and share them with the speakers and co-workers in marketing or others who have either a great sense of the topic or the audience. Ask them to poke holes in the drafts and to suggest keywords or changes to make it stronger. In the end, have your content marketing or copywriters review and finalize it tapping into their copy/editing expertise.
- If after promoting the webinar, you are not seeing a good registration conversation rate, don’t be afraid to tweak your title if you think it may not be resonating. Obviously you shouldn’t change the focus of the webinar content, but tweaking a few words to make the title stronger is fine.
So what does a good webinar title look like? When working on this blog post I came across one from Cheetah Digital, which I thought was quite strong:
The #1 Secret to Smashing Your Email Marketing KPIs
Here is what I like about it:
- Includes a number – “#1” – numbers always help convey value to potential registrants and they stand out among the words in the title.
- “Secret” – perhaps an overused word like “hack” – but it conveys that you might be surprised at the answer, that only they -the experts – know this information. It also creates a sense of intrigue … making people want to find out what is the “secret.”
- ”Smashing” – who doesn’t want to smash their KPIs? Smashing is also just a fun word, is simple and direct, and makes Cheetah Digital sound human and not like a big company.
- “Your” – makes the topic feel personal.
- “Email Marketing” – very clear who the target audience is for this webinar – if you are an email marketer, take notice and you will want to learn the secret.
- “KPIs” – while KPIs, the acronym for Key Performance Indicators, has been around for years, it seems to be a hotter term than something like “metrics” at the moment. “KPIs” also tends to speak to a hire-level audience (e.g., Director-level and above), and so use of KPIs might filter out very junior marketers and small businesses who aren’t Cheetah’s Digital’s target audience.
- Overall, the length feels just right. It is concise, fun, intriguing, easy to understand and motivated me to want to find out what the is the secret.
Have you come across a really good webinar title recently? Please share it in the comments. And do you have a favorite webinar title writing tip (dare I use the word “hack”) – I would love to hear what it is.