Three Questions to Answer When Launching a Webinar
Webinars are great because they are...
An effective way to showcase your expertise
Can be used as a news announcement to drum up awareness about your company
A good way to engage with and nurture prospects and sales opportunities
Can be used for future content marketing
A way to attract new leads and business partners
There are tons of other direct and indirect benefits to hosting a webinar, but if you’re reading this post I imagine I don’t need to try to convince you to host a webinar. You’re probably just trying to figure out the ins and outs of webinars as a marketing tool.
We’ve helped dozens of clients host webinars and we’ve done a few on our own. Through our experience, we’ve made mistakes, had some great successes and learned a few lessons. I’m here to share what we’ve learned and what questions you should ask before you host your own webinar.
What are your goals?
What do you want to achieve by hosting a webinar?
To answer this question, rank order these business challenges on a scale from, 1 being the top challenge and 4 being the least-urgent challenge.
The business needs more new leads
We can’t convert existing leads to sales opportunities
Sales opportunities get stuck in the pipeline
Our customers aren’t getting the full value out of our product and retention is a problem
It’s likely that all of these are challenges for your business, but pick the challenge, that if solved, would have the biggest impact on your business.
This decision will determine your goal of the webinar, which will be one of the following:
More new leads
More sales opportunities
Turning opportunities into sales
Improved customer retention and upsell opportunities
Your goal will help you answer the next question...
Who is your audience?
Like any marketing effort, before you begin development, you need to know who your audience. We start here to ensure that the information you’re sharing will be relevant, useful, and interesting to the people you’re inviting to the webinar.
Here’s a way to think about defining your audience and how that decision might change the content of your webinar, packaged within a dating metaphor.
New contacts
If you’re on Tinder, these are people who have never seen you before, they have the choice to swipe left or right. You have to build their trust and court them. You’re starting at square one with this group.
Existing prospects
This is the group of dating prospects that know you. You’ve had conversations via text or email, they’ve swiped right. You’re not an unknown, but they also still have questions and hesitations about going on a date with you.
Sales opportunities.
Things are heating up! These people have gone on a date with you, maybe even a couple of dates. They like you, but they don’t know how much they like you. They are still seeing that other guy, playing the field, seeing who is the nicest, smartest, and might be the most useful in an apocalypse scenario.
Customers
This is your partner. Just as every long-term relationship takes work, romance, learning, sharing, nurturing, etc. customer relationships need nurturing too.
What is your topic?
Now that you know who your audience is, you can decide what your topic will be. What does this audience need to know? What questions do they have?
One question that I love to ask is, “What do these people need to know in order to become who they want to be?” We are all working towards some aspirational self. What expertise does your business have that can help them achieve the best version of themselves.
Research is really important during this stage. Here are a few recommended places to look for inspiration:
Your customers:
Going directly to the source is the best way to get ideas. The most interesting ideas come from the field. If you can talk to your clients and ask them questions about their work, their challenges, what keeps them up at night, what their boss is demanding from them, you can get some incredible insight and inspiration.
Industry publishers:
I recommend checking through industry publications and trends reports to see what news and topics are being covered. If your company has a perspective to take or a unique idea related to news-worthy topics, that could be a great focus for your webinar.
Industry groups:
Check out LinkedIn groups, Slack groups, associations, and membership groups in your industry. These are excellent places to see what’s being discussed and see the questions that people are posing to their peers.
Your competitors:
This is my least favorite option, but it’s still a good one. Take a look at your competitors to see what topics they are talking about and even more importantly, what they aren’t talking about. What challenges and ideas can you address that your competitors aren’t?
Investigating these four areas will give you some awesome insight into the topics that you could cover. Once you’ve come up with a couple of ideas, pitch them to the audience that you intend to invite to the webinar and see what gets them most excited. This is a great way to validate your idea and generate new ideas for the content of the webinar.
Which we’ll get to in our next post—the nitty-gritty of creating, promoting, and running your webinar. For more details on the different stages of launching a webinar, download our webinar checklist.
