6 Creative Webinar Topics and Ideas for Higher Engagement

Webinars are increasingly popular for marketing strategy, lead generation, and customer engagement. Over half of marketers rely on these types of virtual events for promotion and other forms of online marketing, thanks to their accessibility and convenience. However, popularity isn’t enough to guarantee a successful webinar; you need to know what your target audience wants to achieve and then choose the best webinar topics to address it.

In addition to supporting your business objectives, the right webinar topic is crucial to attract the right leads and measure success. In this article, we’ll go over why your topic selection is so important, how to brainstorm subjects using the Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) framework, and offer some example webinar ideas. We’ll also introduce the concept of the Webinar Arc and how it should drive your entire webinar strategy.

Why the Right Webinar Topic Is Important

Well-crafted webinars are an excellent marketing tool that perform well at every stage of your funnel, whether that means attracting leads for your sales team, engaging with existing customers, or building brand awareness and thought leadership for your company.

Choosing the right webinar topic starts with understanding your business objectives. Once you understand the goals your online event should accomplish, you can identify your target customers’ desired outcomes to determine what webinar content will drive them closer to achieving those objectives.

As a result, you’ll secure more conversions, offer a better experience for your attendees, and concretely connect your webinar to the business objectives your company is focused on.

1) Greater Relevance (and More Conversions)

A popular webinar topic increases the relevance of your content, which drives a more efficient funnel. You deliver targeted information at the right moment during the customer journey, and that helps you close deals and drive conversions.

This also prevents you from serving a hard sell to an audience that’s only interested in a quick introduction to your industry. When you try to sell to webinar attendees who are still in the early stages of the buying journey, you weaken your relevance, along with their trust and attention — and a lack of trust will push your leads toward a competitor.

2) A Better Attendee Experience

Leads and customers enjoy a more rewarding webinar experience when your topic is tailored to their needs. Your attendees feel heard and derive greater value when the subject matter focuses on their pain points. In turn, a positive experience motivates them to take action.

One way to provide a better attendee experience is by holding a Q&A session, which puts viewers in the spotlight and allows them to share their views on the topics they care about most. For more options to capture and hold audience attention during your sessions, look to your webinar platform. Demio, for instance, boasts several audience engagement features that enhance the user experience, including chat, Q&A, polls and surveys, and more.

Selecting a well-aligned topic based on your audience is profitable both for your business and your attendees.

3) A Focus on Business Objectives

Your webinar topic also contributes to your overarching business objectives by helping you achieve your webinar goals. What broad objectives do you want to accomplish? Do you want to retain audience members for longer periods of time, or create brand awareness? Hone in on these objectives to help you create webinar topics and engagement strategies that can help you reach these goals and objectives. 

For example, if higher ROI is your goal, then your objective is to insert more effective CTAs. Focus on business objectives, and it’ll keep you on track, in line with your overarching goals, and help you craft relevant content that contributes to what your organization aims to achieve. 

So, how do you find a relevant, engaging topic for your next webinar?

Webinar Topic Ideas by Format

How-To Webinars

These revolve around teaching how to use, contribute to, or benefit from a product, service, or action, making them excellent for new customers especially. How-tos are one of many interactive webinar formats you can consider for hosting quality virtual events that generate leads. The topic doesn’t even have to be industry-related; for example, a how-to webinar could explain how entrepreneurs can influence societal inclusion or how small businesses can help fight global warming. 

Virtual Product Launches

Webinars are great for these because of the hype leading up to the big event: You can hold a virtual countdown when a product launch occurs and then showcase the new products in a virtual product demo during the event. Your audience will delight in being able to interact together while taking part in your brand’s growth. 

Expert Take on Trendy Topics

Social media platforms provide an excellent outlet for speaking about trending webinar topics, especially those related to your industry. Establishing your brand as an authority on sites like LinkedIn is a great way to grow your demographic and create consumer trust while creating greater value for your customers as well. Choose industry experts who know current trends well and can create compelling narratives around them so your webinars really stand out. 

Q&A Session

A Q&A session is one of the best ways to uncover what your audience wants and needs without having to implore them to fill out surveys or take polls. It also reveals how much your audience knows about your brand and helps you develop a more personal relationship with them at the same time. It’s one of the most effective webinar engagement activities you can try.

Current Events 

Being knowledgeable on current events shows your brand is aware of the issues and trends of the world around you, not just as they relate to your brand. Being a thought leader is important to build credibility, and hosting topics related to global occurrences is an excellent way to establish your authority and resonate with your audience in a positively impactful way. 

Industry Pain Points

Focus on the issues your audience has that they want to discuss — whether or not they directly relate to your business — to encourage audience participation and growth. Hone in on specific pain points and offer solutions along with case studies about how they worked for your business. 

How to Choose Your Next Webinar Topic

Webinar topic selection revolves around a few key considerations: what your audience wants, what your event goals are, and what platform you use to execute quality sessions. 

Webinar Goals

Define your webinar goals. Do you want a stronger ROI? Greater audience retention? Use your webinar platform’s analytics tools to track the weaknesses in your digital events and develop strong topics that can improve them. For example, if the goal is to increase audience trust, choose pain points in your industry to educate and help your audience. 

Audience Interest

What does your audience want to discuss? Using your webinar platform’s engagement tools, you can ask your audience via surveys, polls, or feedback submissions what topics they’d like you to cover next. 

Webinar Platform

The webinar platform you use will determine what topics you should discuss. For example, interactive webinar platforms are great for how-tos and product demos. On the other hand, automated webinar platforms excel at evergreen topics to retain relevancy and repurpose content. Keep this in mind if you want to address current events or build a webinar series of on-demand sessions. 

Combine the JTBD Framework With Demio’s Webinar Arc

To select a compelling webinar topic for any stage of the funnel, consider employing the JTBD framework, combined with an original concept from Demio we call the Webinar Arc.

The JTBD Framework

“When you buy an automobile, you buy speedy transportation—but you could walk. But when you buy plumbing, you buy cleanliness—for which there is no substitute!” – 1923 newspaper ad highlighting customer needs for the product

The JTBD framework involves mapping products, information, marketing, and other elements to customer needs. Top organizations use this framework because it takes an audience-first approach, focusing on user needs, types of customers, and their desired outcomes.

A strong webinar strategy aligns the subject matter with consumer needs and challenges to deliver valuable insight and solutions. The JTBD framework helps you build topics around your audience’s goals — the outcomes they seek and how they want to accomplish them.

Tip: This framework relies on effective audience targeting. Most brands already have this down to some extent, but it’s a good time to brush up on your customer personas and make sure your profiles are still accurate.

The Webinar Arc

We’re introducing a new concept called the Webinar Arc. The Webinar Arc is all about guiding your audience from one state (their current circumstances) to another (a future, improved status) over the course of your webinar. This new state must be closer to their desired outcome than they were before; that’s the entire purpose of the webinar.

Many companies approach webinars in terms of how many leads and sales they can earn from the event. Those can be goals of the event, but don’t confuse them with your webinar’s purpose. The purpose of your webinar is to focus on helping your audience move closer to their desired outcome.

A webinar can accommodate every stage of the sales funnel, but you need to hone in on where your audience is in it and what you need to do to bring them nearer to where they want to be.

Example: Your Business Objective Is to Become the Market Leader in a New Vertical

You might set a webinar goal of introducing your brand and company to the buyers within that new market.

Your webinar goal and KPIs could look like this:

Your webinar arc would then look like this:

The state of your target segment prior to the webinar is one of unknowing; this new market likely has never heard of you or your company. The aim of your webinar is to excite and interest them enough to continue the conversation. Notice the end of the arc isn’t “becomes a customer” — that’s not an appropriate jump for where this audience is in their relationship with your company.

Your webinar topic needs to consider your target’s starting point, the results they expect, the state you want to bring them to (which should be nearer to their desired outcome), and how that ties in to your company goals.

With this in mind, let’s turn to the aspects you need to think about when developing your webinar topic.

Considerations for Your Webinar Topics

Certain factors require careful attention when determining your webinar topic.

Webinar Goal

What do you want to achieve with this webinar? Why are you investing your time in it?

Goals can be complex and change with each webinar, so it’s important that they be measurable and explicit. You may want to use a framework like S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Time-Based) to ensure your goals track to business outcomes.

Remember, the purpose of the Webinar Arc is to have your audience take an incremental step toward their desired outcome, not necessarily jump straight to conversion.

Company KPIs

How does your company measure success? Is it the number of sign-ups, recurring revenue, monthly users, or something else? Success differs depending on your goals and metrics.

Analyze your broader KPIs to estimate how effective your webinar topic will be, then set your event-specific metrics based on those. They should be targeted and measurable to ensure you collect the proper data. You can choose either a single “North Star” KPI or multiple. 

Your Audience’s Desired Outcome

“Your product isn’t your customers’ desired outcome — it’s just a tool. Hopefully, that tool gets them closer to their desired outcome — but it isn’t ALL of it.” – Ashley Levesque, VP of Communications at Demio

What do your customers care about? When someone buys a drill, for instance, they don’t want a tool — they want a hole. Buying a webinar platform is useless if you don’t know how to create and run a great webinar. For example, we’ve found that Demio customers want to make an impact at their organizations. They want to influence business goals and feel confident doing so. Dig deeper than the external challenges and work to identify the internal struggles that plague your audience.

Take a look at your customer journey and the JTBD framework. It’s imperative to understand the various challenges and goals across your customer subgroups since most companies have several target audiences and use cases.

Again, think about what subject will lead your audience closer to their desired outcome (and your product or service). You don’t have to rush into a sales pitch, but you do have to focus on propelling your audience to a new state with your webinar.

Your Product Relevance

Imagine you have the perfect topic that’s incredibly relevant and useful to your audience. If you can’t incorporate your company into it, it’s a great topic — for the wrong audience. For example, if you’re an eCommerce fulfillment company that doesn’t support branded packaging, but eCommerce merchants come to you asking about customizing their boxes and inserts, you shouldn’t discuss how to customize boxes.

Whatever the gap between where your audience is and where they want to be, your webinar should position your brand as part of their ideal solution.

For example, imagine your company operates a review management platform for eCommerce companies. You could host a webinar on how to earn more reviews on Walmart Marketplace, or how to secure more sales on your D2C eCommerce website. Both topics would treat your company as either part of or the whole solution to your audience’s challenge.

The JTBD framework helps you formulate targeted and quantifiable webinar topics around your customers’ needs and issues. As a result, you can connect more intimately with their internal and external problems, deliver relevant information, and foster positive change in their lives. In turn, this drives  stronger results for your bottom line.

Examples of JTBD Webinar Topics

Let’s look at a few examples of a fictitious company with multiple goals using the JTBD framework to develop a webinar topic. Imagine the company sells small-batch roasted coffee in sealed packaging designed to preserve freshness and quality. They have a direct-to-consumer online store and a subscription offering.

Example Webinar Topic #1

Webinar Goal: Boost customer relationships with the intent to convert to a subscription
KPI: Number of existing customers registering for the webinar, percentage of those who convert to the subscription
The Job To Be Done: Not being able to make good coffee at home
Solution: Provide tips to improve coffee at home
Current State: They don’t know what they’re doing wrong when preparing coffee at home
Future State: They understand where they’re going wrong in the coffee brewing process
Webinar Topic: Home Brewing Coffee: A Workshop for Coffee Lovers 

Example Webinar Topic #2

Webinar Goal: Provide value to subscription holders to extend their loyalty
KPI: Subscription renewals from registrants within one month after the webinar
The Job To Be Done: Finding time to brew coffee at home
Solution: Make it easier and cheaper to brew coffee at home
Current State: They forgot they signed up for a coffee subscription, or it’s at the back of their mind
Future State: They look forward to their next subscription refill
Webinar Topic: 10 Ways To Save Time When Working From Home

Example Webinar Topic #3

Webinar Goal: Generate 20 new top-of-funnel sign-ups
KPI: Email registrants or users acting on the end-of-webinar discount CTA
The Job To Be Done: Cafés are pricey, but grocery store-bought coffee doesn’t taste as good
Solution: Teach consumers why store-bought coffee doesn’t deliver — and what does
Current State: They believe only coffee from cafés is high quality, and the next best thing is grocery beans (which are never as good)
Future State: They know there’s an answer in between: craft D2C coffee roasters
Webinar Topic: Save Money With 6 Easy Steps To Make Barista-Quality Coffee at Home

In other webinar scenarios, you can use the same goals, KPIs, and solutions to craft multiple topics.

Let’s analyze Example #3 more closely and synthesize that webinar goal and KPI to produce some topics for subsequent webinars:

• Why Store-Bought Coffee Is Never Fresh Enough
• X Different Coffee Roasts and How They Impact Your Brew
• Are Mass Market Producers Burning Your Coffee?

The JTBD framework lets you see your goals, target, solution, and KPIs for every webinar at a glance. You can track quality, measure results, and see how the topic maps to customer wants and needs.

It also helps determine important factors like key takeaways, potential event structure, and which audience segment you’re targeting with greater ease. Having this data can significantly improve the design and promotion of your webinar.

Your Webinar Topics Checklist

Finally, double-check the following list before you settle on your webinar topic:

• Have you set a measurable webinar goal?
• Did you choose (and validate) KPIs for your webinar goal?
• Is your topic relevant to your audience’s current state and where they’re at in your funnel?
• Will the topic help your audience move closer to their desired outcome?
• Does the topic map well to an audience demographic or customer type?
• Does the topic support your business objectives?

A strong webinar topic addresses your audience’s challenges, which are the barriers keeping them from their desired outcome. Combining the JTBD framework with the Webinar Arc to hone in on your subject matter ensures a first-rate webinar that drives business results and empowers your audience to take the next step.

Getting More out of Your Webinars

A gripping and interactive topic will keep audiences engaged, gain more qualified leads, and help you maintain brand awareness and growth — all while addressing your audience’s pain points and establishing yourself as a thought leader. 

Besides the subject matter, the right webinar platform can help you take your digital events to the next level. Discuss nearly any topic you want with Demio, your easy-to-use webinar solution. From hosting educational Q&A sessions to making virtual product launches interactive and fun, Demio has the tools to reach your audience and return lucrative results. Get started for free or book a demo to learn more.

Frequently Asked Questions About Webinar Topics

How Do You Make Webinars More Interesting? 

Hone in on what your audience wants to learn more about to make webinars more relevant — and more interesting — to them. 

How Do You Choose an Evergreen Webinar Topic?

Evergreen topics are excellent for digital events because you can turn live webinars into automated ones. Choose evergreen topics by focusing on ideas and themes that are relevant all the time, rather than passing trends. 

How Do You Engage Your Audience Without Being Pushy? 

Engaging your audience is easy if you use the right webinar tools to communicate and interact with them. A simple Q&A session is a great way to engage your audience, along with posting surveys and polls.