The Secret to Selecting the Right Webinar Topic

As many businesses have found out when looking to offer a webinar to clients and/or prospects, selecting the right topic for your webinar is harder than it sounds. It’s important not to lose sight that the purpose of a webinar is to educate and assist your target audience, not pitch the benefits and features of your service offering. For example, you might offer a webinar that looks at business continuity best practices, as opposed to detailing your BDR solution.

“Educational” Does Not Mean Educating Your Audience About Your Service 

Webinars are supposed to be educational and engaging. The best way to capture the attention of your target audience, and ultimately, their business, is to make them feel you have the skillset required to meet their needs. Webinars should never be about you.

• Identify Pain Points/Challenges: For a topic, you should look at a common issue that your solution solves. Ask yourself why clients seek out your service. Which technology challenges does their business face every day?
• Audience Appropriate: Primarily, your audience is going to be comprised of SMB decision makers. This needs to be taken into account when creating your webinar, as the content should be shaped toward their interests. Being overly technical or speaking as though your audience is comprised of children will quickly alienate your target market.
• Research: Even as an expert in the area of SMB technology, there is always something to be learned. Your audience will be attending your webinar to learn - it’s imperative that the information you provide is accurate and up-to-date.

Narrow Focus

One thing that we run into a lot when building webinars and presentations is the attempt to offer the largest quantity of valuable information into a single webinar. It’s understandable. You’re the business IT expert, so you want to share your knowledge and show off your skillset. The problem becomes that while you’re offering a ton of solid information, your audience's’ heads will be spinning. By overwhelming them with too much info, regardless of the quality, you’re probably not going to hold their attention.

Instead, focus your attention on explaining the pieces of your topic clearly.

Make Their Lives Easier

Once you have a few possible topics picked out, you need to ask the question ‘Is this topic important to my audience or is it a topic I want to talk about to sell my products and services?’ Be honest. It’ll help your webinar perform better in the long run. For example:

• Weak Topic: The different types of backup and which you think is the best.
• Strong Topic: The importance of SMB business continuity and disaster planning that touches on different types of backup - and eventually comes around to the solutions you just so happen to offer.

Still struggling with finding a webinar topic that really resonates with your readers? Our marketing team can help you plan and execute a webinar that will get results. Call us at 888-546-4384 today!