Webinar:
How to amplify your webinar distribution and attract the right audience

Welcome and introductions

This session pairs Pauline Mura from Livestorm, who works on marketing partnerships and has run webinar distribution there for three years, with Koen Stevens, CEO and Co-Founder of Ambassify.

Koen describes Ambassify as the most complete advocacy and engagement platform, helping customers cut paid advertising and recruitment costs by activating the asset they already have: their own employees. Those employees come together in a closed community, with gamification layered on so participation stays enjoyable while still building business value.

The session was live-streamed to YouTube and LinkedIn alongside Livestorm, which turned out to be a working demonstration of one of the tactics discussed.

Match your promotion channels to your goal

Before running through channels, Pauline makes the point that determines everything else. The channels you use, the metrics you watch, and the audience you target all change depending on what the webinar is for.

Brand awareness, lead generation, educating existing customers, and upselling are four different jobs. You can adapt any promotion channel to any of them, but you should not use the same mix for all four. Whatever you choose, track with UTMs so you know what is actually performing.

An audience poll during the session found email overwhelmingly prioritised and employee advocacy barely used, which is roughly the gap this webinar exists to address.

Koen adds a data point from Ambassify's own communities: around 20% of webinar subscribers come through employee advocacy. More interestingly, those subscribers convert better at later stages, so the conversion to lead and to customer is higher than from other sources. It is also free.

Email is still the biggest driver

Pauline is direct about this: email accounts for something like 85% of her sign-ups.

Including a webinar in a newsletter works as a first touch, especially well in advance. But if you want an email that performs, use a dedicated send. Snappy copy and an A/B tested subject line matter, but segmentation is where the real difference is made, because it lets you tailor the copy to each audience.

Her approach is to segment by persona first (are these people interested in training, use cases, or marketing topics?) and then by behaviour, particularly whether they have previously downloaded content related to this specific topic. If they have, the webinar is a natural next step.

Email signature banners, the real estate nobody uses

Koen is a strong advocate for this one. Ambassify built an internal system that makes it easy to switch between active campaigns, with every email signature updating automatically.

Anyone who received an email from him in the weeks before this webinar would have had the promotion in the signature, one click from the registration page. Different departments can run different campaigns simultaneously: marketing pushing one thing, sales another, the leadership team another again.

His point is that most email signatures are a picture and some contact details, which is a lot of unused real estate given the volume of email a company sends.

Your website and in-app messaging

Email works your existing database. The remaining channels are how you reach people who do not know you yet, which makes them the ones that matter for awareness and net-new leads.

For your website, the question is again who you want to talk to, and the answer determines which pages you use. Options include banners on relevant pages, pop-ups, a highlight on the blog, and CTAs inside existing blog articles that already rank for a related topic. If you run a chatbot, give it a playbook for the webinar for a week or two on selected pages.

Pauline is specific about where not to do this. The homepage can be too aggressive or simply irrelevant. A pricing page visitor is close to converting on something more valuable, so do not divert them. Resource pages and customer stories are better placements.

The same logic applies in-app, where segmentation decides everything. If the webinar covers a premium feature, target paying customers. If you are trying to convert free users, target them with entry-level content instead.

One practical tip: rotate the message. A banner that has visibly sat on your homepage for three weeks looks stale and stops performing. Either run it for one week and stop, or switch the creative regularly.

Social media, posts and teasers

Social gives you engagement with your existing followers plus genuine reach beyond them, because content is shareable and hashtags extend it.

Beyond the standard announcement posts, make sharing easy for employees by preparing ready-made posts in several variants. Short video teasers of the speakers talking about what is coming up perform particularly well.

LinkedIn events, and the automation that makes them work

Pauline distinguishes LinkedIn events from the live restream. A LinkedIn event makes the date unambiguous and the sign-up genuinely frictionless: one click on Attend, with no registration form to abandon.

The catch is that attending on LinkedIn does not put anyone in your webinar platform. Her first attempts meant manually messaging every single registrant to get them signed up properly, and roughly 70% of LinkedIn event sign-ups were lost in the process.

The fix is an automation. Create the event, use the standard LinkedIn registration form, then connect it to your webinar platform with Zapier or Make. Registrants land in your Livestorm event, receive every reminder email, and get the replay, which lifts attendance considerably.

Restreaming for reach rather than leads

If you are chasing awareness rather than gated leads, simultaneous restreaming to YouTube, LinkedIn or X extends your reach to people who may never have interacted with you.

The trade-off is data. You will not get the full attendee detail, including email addresses, that a registration form gives you. In Livestorm, restreaming is a paid add-on supporting up to five simultaneous platforms.

Connecting it works the same way on each platform. For LinkedIn, you need a company page and you create the event as live with a third party, which exposes a stream key you paste into the Livestorm dashboard. For YouTube, create a live stream in YouTube Studio and copy its key across.

Pauline's operational advice: if you restream, arrange a moderator in advance. Someone needs to watch the questions in the webinar platform while also keeping an eye on the restream channels.

Why employee advocacy is the underused channel

Koen opens by acknowledging the problem everyone recognises. More companies are running more webinars, all competing for the same attention, and the quest for attention has become a genuine battle. Paid advertising still belongs in the mix, but it has a cost, and employees can cover a meaningful part of that cost because they are more trustworthy and their networks are more relevant.

The numbers behind it:

• The combined network of a company's employees is on average at least 10x larger than the company's own follower base. Koen suggests testing this yourself: compare your company page followers against the sum of your employees' networks.
• Nearly 64% of participants in a formal advocacy programme credit employee advocacy with attracting and developing new business.
• Companies can see up to 5x greater reach when messages are shared by employees.

Koen is careful about that last one. Reach on its own is close to a vanity metric, but it is where everything starts. From reach you look at clicks, then subscribers, then what converts into leads and new business.

He also handles the objection he hears most: this will look spammy, my feed is full of it. His answer is that you are systematically overestimating it, because you work at the company. You see every colleague's post. A prospect might see two.

There is a targeting argument too. Company page followers include a lot of people who would like to work for you but are nowhere near your ICP. Employees' networks tend to contain the right people.

Avoiding the LinkedIn duplicate content penalty

Answering an audience question during the session, Koen addresses the obvious risk with advocacy: if every colleague posts identical copy, the LinkedIn algorithm suppresses it.

Ambassify's answer is variants. Community managers setting up a campaign can add multiple versions of both the copy and the images. Combined with scheduling, you get different copy and different images going out at different times across several days. LinkedIn reads that as fresh content and boosts it, rather than treating it as one message duplicated fifty times.

Affiliate campaigns, making sharing trackable

The first of two campaign types Koen walks through.

A community manager sets up the campaign with its variants and schedule. Employees see the post and share it to their channels with a single click. Ambassify supports LinkedIn, Facebook and X as the main channels for webinar promotion, plus regional networks including Xing in Germany and WeChat in Asia.

What makes it useful is conversion tracking. Through pixels, you can see exactly who brought in which subscribers. Koen's example: Pauline shared this promotion a week ago, six people subscribed through her link, and three of them actually attended.

The same mechanic works for vacancies, and this is where Koen sees the sharpest cost saving. Recruitment agencies can cost ten, fifteen or twenty thousand to place someone. Several current Ambassify employees came in through employee referrals instead.

The old version of this was the free iPad scheme: refer a candidate, get a gadget. It was entirely manual, so the process was error-prone. Now it is fully trackable, which means you can see that a colleague shared a vacancy a month ago, six applicants came through that link, and one of them was hired two months later. The reward can then be issued automatically.

Rewards that are not iPads

Koen has noticed a clear shift. People are less focused on monetary rewards than they used to be and much more open to other kinds.

Sustainable rewards are the obvious example: bring in a job applicant or ten webinar subscribers and the company plants a hundred trees. That can be fully automated in the programme.

His more interesting example is a LinkedIn recommendation. Plenty of people are nervous about asking their manager directly, because the manager may read it as are you leaving? Folding it into a gamification catalogue removes the awkwardness entirely: you click a button, and writing the recommendation becomes a normal part of the programme.

Referral campaigns

The second campaign type, and mechanically simpler because it needs no conversion tracking or pixels.

Instead of sharing publicly, you ask your advocate directly: who else would be interested in this? They fill in a first name, last name and email, that person receives an email and can subscribe easily, and the subscription is still attributed back to whoever referred them.

The same mechanic extends well beyond webinars. Ask your best customers to refer potential customers from their own networks. Ask employees to refer other employees. Ask active ambassadors to invite other ambassadors, which gives the community itself a viral effect. Koen's point is that some people are uncomfortable making the ask face to face, and a structured programme removes that friction.

Crowdsourcing your next webinar or event

Koen's favourite tactic, and the one that got the strongest reaction.

Rather than deciding your programme internally, put it to your community. We are considering these speakers for our next event, they are available, they talk about X, Y and Z. Which would you like? Once a speaker is chosen, go further: this speaker usually presents on these topics, which do you want to hear?

You end up building the event from your audience's stated needs. As Pauline puts it, the usual model is you guessing who your target audience is and what they want. This inverts it: the audience tells you.

Koen takes it as far as catering, asking which of three food trucks people would prefer. The reason is not the food. The more people participate in shaping an event, the higher the attendance rate and the higher the engagement, because they are invested before it starts.

Pauline offers a lighter version Livestorm has used: add an open text field to the registration form or a reminder email asking what questions people have in advance, then adjust the presentation accordingly. Useful, though as she admits, not as bold as letting the audience pick the speaker from a shortlist.

After the webinar, making it evergreen

Distribution does not stop when the session ends. The point is to keep the webinar generating awareness and leads long afterwards.

The baseline is on-demand: send the replay to every registrant and attendee, and publish it. Most companies have a resources section for this. Livestorm also provides an automatic company page listing upcoming and on-demand webinars, which is useful for smaller companies without a developed website, and good for SEO if you make them public.

From there, repurpose:

• Turn the transcript into blog posts and ebooks.
• Cut the recording into short clips for social, linking back to the on-demand version.
• Publish to YouTube for reach and visibility.
• Use the audio for a podcast.
• Make it available to client-facing teams as an internal library they can pull from when a prospect raises a specific topic.
• Embed short videos on relevant website and blog pages, which helps those pages rank.

Pauline's one significant tip: plan the repurposing before you run the webinar. If you already know you want a podcast episode, an ebook, and three short clips, you can structure the session to produce them, which saves considerable work afterwards.

The planning timeline

Start as early as possible, because early gives you room to react to what is and is not performing.

At least one month out, lock the topic, the speakers and the format, and get the landing page live that same week. That also buys you time to prepare assets for every distribution channel.

Then start testing three weeks out. Begin slowly, watch what works, and save your extra pushes for the final few days when you need to lift the numbers.

Koen notes this fits neatly with crowdsourcing, which arguably means starting earlier still, since you need to gather input before you can lock the content. Both agree the real value is having a repeatable structure rather than reinventing it each time.

Q&A, how do employees connect their social accounts?

Straightforward, per Koen. You connect once, the same way you would authorise any app with LinkedIn or Facebook, grant permission, and from then on sharing is a single click. You can also pick which copy variant fits you best, and if you have the permissions, post to a company page rather than your personal profile.

The more interesting part of his answer is what Ambassify deliberately does not do. Everything is automated up to the point where the employee clicks share, and that click stays manual by design. As he puts it, they do not want employees to be spam bots.

The exception is leadership. C-level executives are often too busy, and having someone curate content on their behalf makes sense there. But as a general default, Ambassify advises against fully automatic posting.

Q&A, how do you argue for brand awareness over leads?

An audience member asked how to convince a boss that awareness matters as much as leads. Pauline concedes it is a hard one.

Her argument is that the trend is moving that way regardless. People are increasingly unwilling to hand over their data to access content, and there is a genuine shift toward ungated content and community value rather than being pursued by email. PlayPlay has published research pointing in that direction, and ungating a substantial piece of content produced a large jump in their traffic and considerably more shares.

The trade-off is honest: gating loses you the people who will not fill in a form, while ungating means measuring different things. You look at traffic, then at how well you can engage that traffic, which is harder.

Her practical suggestion is to test it. If your audience is large enough, run gated against ungated and compare.

Closing thoughts

The poll results at the end reinforced the premise of the session. Email remains king, and most attendees had no employee advocacy programme in place at all, which is precisely why they were deprioritising it.

For Pauline, that means email is working and the goal for the year is developing the other channels so she relies on it less. For Koen, it is the opportunity: the channel with the highest later-stage conversion rate is the one almost nobody has set up yet.