Webinar marketing part 1: Choosing the topic and the speaker for your webinar
Choosing a topic for the webinar is probably the most important part of organizing a webinar.
Everything else builds on top of that. Your speaker, your content, and most importantly your ability to reach your audience. They will all depend on the topic you choose, so it’s important to choose it wisely.
This may sound a little daunting, but there are many ways to find a topic your audience will care about, and I will run through them in this post.
This is the second post in a series on webinar marketing for Indie Hackers. Visit the introduction post to learn more on why Webinars can be a powerful tool in the Indie Hackers marketing toolset
What makes a good webinar topic?
A good webinar topic is a topic your target audience cares about a lot. Why? Because the hardest part of the webinar is to get your audience to register and attend the webinar, and if they don’t care about the topic, they will never sign up.
A good webinar is a topic that teaches your audience something new they didn’t know before. It could be a new way of thinking or some vital knowledge they are missing.
Generally speaking, the topic of the webinar shouldn’t be your product. You want to reach a wider audience than what your product solves at the moment.
The beauty about webinars is that the topic doesn’t have to match your product 1:1. You can even use webinars to experiment with areas of interest your product doesn’t cover yet.
The perfect webinar topic is a topic that your audience will jump on when seeing the title. It’s hard enough to promote webinars, so make it easier by choosing a topic your audience cares about a lot.
Should I look for a speaker first?
Sometimes choosing a topic and choosing a speaker are intertwined.
If you recruit a speaker that is well known within your target audience, you might choose the topic based on the expertise of the speaker. In these cases, your speakers would be a key part of your webinar promotion strategy.
If your speaker isn’t well known within your target audience, I would recommend making sure your target audience cares about the topic. It’s tempting to just recruit someone you know, but if the topic is a topic your target audience doesn’t care about, no one wins.
How to come up with a webinar topic?
By now, it should be clear why the webinar topic is important. In fact, it’s not too hard to find a topic your audience cares about. Here are a few ways you can come up with a topic your audience cares about a lot.
I will walk through these methods with examples from my previous product: A platform for freelancers to take care of their taxes.
Choose a topic that comes up frequently when interacting with customers
If you already have existing customers, you are probably handling support requests regularly, doing customer interviews, and depending on the product, making sales calls.
Gathering popular topics from these customer interactions would provide a way to come up with a great topic for the webinar. You should look at topics that come up again and again.
Example webinar topic from the freelancers taxes product: What is tax deductible?
Users of our freelancers’ taxes platform kept asking which expenses they can claim for tax purposes. Although the information did exist on our platform, there was an opportunity to address this topic as a whole. This turned out to be a very successful webinar. Many of our prospect customers signed up to this webinar, and converted into paying customers.
Choose a topic that is relevant to an upcoming date
If there is a date that is important to your audience, you can use that to educate your audience around that date. For example, if Black Friday is coming, and you help your customers sell their products, you might want to educate them about how to make the most out of Black Friday.
Example webinar topic from the freelancers taxes product: How to make the most of your freelancer tax return?
Freelancers need to hand in their tax forms once a year. They typically dread this date. Educating freelancers about the tax return process in advance was a great way to relieve them of this stress. This webinar was a huge hit. Many people waited for it and then went ahead to submit their tax forms after the webinar.
Choose a topic that comes up frequently in communities that you belong to
If you are just starting out, you may not have enough feedback from your own users. And even if you do, by being involved in a community with your audience, you can always be on top of their most recent challenges.
The volume of interactions in communities tend to be larger than your product. If you address one of the top 3 challenges, you are guaranteed to find a good webinar topic.
Example webinar topic from the freelancers taxes product: Introduction to taxes as a freelancer
We analyzed our Freelancers community, tagged the topics and ranked them according to their frequency. The #1 topic was “How to get started as a new freelancer”. So we addressed this topic from a tax perspective and got an overwhelmingly positive response.
Later on, we added more product features, and this topic became the #1 reason why people find our platform.
Finding a speaker
Now that you found a great topic, your next challenge is to find a speaker that will engage with your audience.
The main job of your speaker is to take your audience on a journey to discover a new topic. If executed well, your audience will come out of the other side with actionable insights that will move them towards achieving their personal or business goals.
This is how you win trust, and ultimately convert your audience into customers.
The speaker can also help you to promote the webinar, but this is not mandatory if you have a good topic your audience cares a lot about.
In this section I will go through a few options of how to find your speaker.
A well known person in your audience
If you are involved in a community with your audience, you probably have a good idea of who the influencers are inside the community. These tend to be the people that are active and valued in the community.
A speaker that is well known in your audience can help you to promote the webinar with very little effort. Promoting the webinar is probably the toughest part of organizing a webinar, so every little helps.
An expert you are already working with
Oftentimes, you may be working with 3rd party service providers to run your product.
In our freelancer taxes product, we worked closely with a partner Tax Advisor. It also happened to be the case that our Tax Advisor partner had great presentation skills and was comfortable standing in front of a larger audience. He was a perfect fit as a speaker.
Keep in mind that the speaker has an important role in taking your audience through the journey of discovering something new. It is important that the speaker has good presentation skills and is comfortable speaking to a larger audience.
A colleague
If the webinar topic is the area of expertise of 1 or 2 people in your company, you can utilize that by giving them the opportunity to speak.
This can be a win-win situation. Your colleagues can have a special moment by speaking to the people they are helping on a daily basis. Your audience will get to meet the people behind your product and deepen their relationship with your company.
You can be the speaker :)
As a founder or marketer of your product, you are likely to have a very good understanding of the topic. Don’t be afraid and get out there.
You will own the entire experience of the webinar. Once you start doing this regularly, you will get a feel for what works and what doesn’t. With every iteration you will improve the quality of the webinar and will win the trust of your audience.
Next in the series: Choosing your webinar streaming platform
See you in the next post :)
P.S. I would love to get your feedback! Let me know if this was helpful and whether there are specific topics you would like me to cover.
