Great Webinar Ideas Are All Around You

I talk about webinars for a living. Every month, and usually several times a month, I serve up a fresh hour of live conversation on the same topic: webinars. And I’m not alone. In recent years we’ve seen a strong trend to more and more companies delivering regular quarterly, monthly, or even weekly webinars. But how many ways are there to talk about the same subject, week after week, year after year? You’d be surprised.

Where am I going to find all this content?

As marketers, we live with constant pressure to come up with new webinar ideas, fresh campaigns, more content. That’s a lot of pressure. But don’t let that get you down. If there is a secret to content marketing, it’s that there are great ideas everywhere you look. You just have to know how to look.

Follow the funnel for webinar ideas

Start with a survey of the webinars you’ve already done. Are you doing a lot of product-focused events? Then maybe it’s time to throw in a thought leadership webinar. Have you created hours of content on best practices? Consider delivering a webinar on your key benefits or differentiators. Once you take a good, long look at the webinars you’ve been creating, it’s easier to see the holes in your content strategy — and every hole in your content strategy is a new idea for a webinar.

And there’s nothing wrong with putting on the same webinar more than once. Here at ON24, we deliver a bottom-of-the-funnel product demo webinar every week. Every week. It’s the same content and the same deck, and it gives us 52 chances a year to reach our customers and prospects.

Phone a friend

If you were creating a TV show instead of a webinar series, you’d have a team of dozens of writers, producers, actors, and other talented people to draw on. Why would you try to run a webinar program all by yourself? Reach out to your sales and customer service teams and ask them what webinar ideas they have or tipice they are getting asked about a lot.

Of course, if it’s the audience perspective you want, why not go straight to the source? Survey past webinar attendees to find out what future topics they’d be interested in seeing. Or spend some time on customer forums, influencer blogs, and social media to see what topics and trends are top-of-mind for your target market.

Look inside yourself

Think about all the great content you’ve already created: white papers, customer case studies. blog posts, videos, and more. That’s a ton of killer content, and chances are you already know which pieces are performing the best for you. Take a look at your analytics and pick out the best-performing assets, and then use them as inspiration for your next webinar. Even content that you might not traditionally think of as a core piece of content, like an email drip campaign, could be packed with interesting and compelling ideas.

If you produce any research or data reports, those are some of the best sources for webinar ideas. People love data, and audiences really appreciate deep-color commentary on the bare-bones facts and figures in your published report. Any sort of benchmarking data that you can provide will be invaluable to your audience and would make a great webinar.

Great ideas are everywhere

And I mean everywhere. Once you learn how to look for them, you’ll find that you have more webinar content ideas than you know what to do with. And now I’m off to come up with some more ideas to give webinars…about webinars.

If you need even more inspiration, check out our on-demand webinar, “10 Secrets for Creating Great Webinar Content.”