How Do I Choose the Best Webinar Topic?
First and foremost, choosing to create and share a webinar is a great way of building trust with your audience. It’s the perfect way to show your potential clients who you are and how you operate. I say all that to say, more often than not, webinars are free. If you decide to charge for a webinar, it then becomes a paid workshop. So for the sake of communal understanding, when I say webinar in this blog, I am talking about a free experience that builds trust with your audience, where you are providing knowledge related to the problem that you're solving in your business.
Now that we’re all on the same page, let’s get into choosing a webinar topic! The headline you want to follow when choosing your webinar topic, is to focus on the ‘what’ because your services themselves focus on the ‘how’. Your webinars should be knowledge building and your services are skill building.
Now, I want to draw some clarity around the difference between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’, because oftentimes folks are wondering, "Well, what do I give away for free if I want people to pay to work with me?" So I want y’all to remember that a webinar is a trust-building process. Which means, you need to provide thoughtful meaningful content around the problem your business is solving, but you aren’t telling them how to solve the problem, or the exact tools and processes you use to solve the problem.
So when you’re deciding on a webinar topic and creating the presentation, you want to be sure you’re providing value and knowledge building, because you want your audience to know that:
You’re happy to share knowledge with them around the problem your business is solving.
You know what you’re talking about and would be considered an expert in the problem your business is solving.
And again, you’re providing this free service to build trust and awareness around you and your business.
Now, when you’re making your decision, you want to be sure you’re choosing something that provides knowledge that would be meaningful for your potential client. Sometimes that knowledge is getting deeper on defining the problem.
For example, let's say my target client is principals and I'm focused on school culture and coaching principals around building an inclusive, nurturing school culture.
Potential webinar topics at the knowledge level and not necessarily yet at the skill building (because the skill building level is your services) could be something like ‘The Five Characteristics of an Effective and Nurturing School Culture’, or it could be ‘Five Obstacles to Creating a Nurturing and Inclusive School Culture’ or even, if you want to go deep into school culture, ‘Five Attributes of Effective Family and Community Engagement’.
Those are just a few examples, but if you notice in those examples, it's focused on the knowledge building level. So if you were to think of the Blooms Ladder, webinars should be closer to the beginning parts of Blooms of building knowledge, and then your services go up towards a higher level of Blooms when actually skill building and pulling everything together.
So when you're thinking about your webinar topic, start by creating a list of maybe 5-10 different knowledge building topics related to the problem your business is solving. Then you can do a little bit of surveying. Now, you could do this through your social media, emails, text messaging and reaching out to folks, but you want to use this opportunity to go to people who would fit the profile of your target client and say something like, "Hey, I'm considering hosting a webinar, here are three-five potential topics. Which topic would you all be most interested in?" Surveying your target client like that is going to give you not only some good data of what people are interested in, but it’ll also build some anticipation. And if you’re not quite ready to reach out to people directly via email or text, you can create a poll on your social media (Facebook or IG Stories are both great options for this) just to get some data back of what feels most meaningful for your target client.
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