Are You Not Entertained? Creating Compelling Webinar Content

Offering valuable, expert content is one of the biggest challenges for marketers because of oversaturation. Increasingly, more brands are casting a bigger net for leads using webinars, creating competition with your own web events using the same tactics and topics.

Plus, what can you tell your audience that they already don’t know? Today’s buyers are smart, consuming content across devices for an average of 60 hours a week.

When you’re fighting for viewers’ time, content value and differentiation is the most important thing you can do. Here are three jumping points for compelling webinar content development:

1. Spy on your target audience.

Just like any other type of content marketing (like emails, blogs, etc.), webinar content must be created for a very specific target audience.

Once you create your persona, find the “watering holes” they frequent—this is where you can often find content ideas unique to your persona in mind. Whether it’s an industry blog or an expert on Twitter, you’ll find inspiration for topics, the tone of voice that resonates with them and even possible content collaborations (see below).

Beyond social listening, you’ll also find problems you can provide solutions for in Internet forums, your own customer feedback or from your trusty sales team.

2. Form content collaborations.

Unless you’re presenting a webinar on marketing, you must have a content partner and co-host that is an expert on the topic at hand. And since most of your time will go into creating, promoting, delivering and analyzing your web event, letting a collaborator handle the content creation is a necessity for the busy marketer.

Partnerships with experts are the most effective, credible and compelling sources of content for webinars. A well-known name alone will increase your registration and attendance.

3. Stay glued to industry trends.

We already know what the trends and challenges are here in the present moment because we face them every day. To give your audience something completely new, stay focused on what’s ahead.

Constantly monitor your industry’s next big trends and look for patterns you can spotlight, new predictions to add (ex: 5 Emerging Trends in the Future of ___) or new data to support them. You can even look back at past events to create a set of lessons your audience can apply in the future or to use as a basis for future trends.

Upcoming trade shows and conference agendas are a rich source to mine for topical trends. This is also where content collaborations with analysts and industry experts come in handy.

Plus, webinars can take weeks, possibly months, to plan, and currently trending topics may fizzle or change again. Focusing on the future offers you a nice balance between content that’s timely and evergreen, an important attribute if you intend on repurposing your content for more ROI.

Of course, once you get them there, you need to keep them there, too, to create a better quality lead. Get more webinar tips on creating engagement at PGi’s blog now.

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