3 ways to Discover Winning Virtual Event Topics

Virtual events are great. They’re cost-effective, scalable, engaging, and overall an excellent way to connect with your audience of choice. Before we dive into methods, it’s important to know why virtual events are gaining traction. 

(If you prefer to hear the article be our guest!)

The reality is change invites relevant content from creators and a need to learn from content consumers.

According to Nic May, CEO of Convergex Connections who has managed over 70 successful events under his direct supervision: 

“As humans, we enjoy sharing and learning. So Idea sharing and new technological adoption create demand for relevant educational material. This in turn establishes a need for events like virtual workshops where industry leaders learn and grow with practical discussions on the latest topics. Networking is always the best by-product of these sessions as well.”

Marketers are often great at brainstorming and that can be a strength and a weakness (or an opportunity). 

The key lies in understanding your research and understanding the relevance of that topic for your audience. 

To help you make better strategies we have 5 key methods you can try today to build an excellent yet relevant topic cluster for your virtual events.

1. Gain insights with customer interviews

Learn from your customers. The best part, it's not hard to get a hold of customers who already know you and your brand.

We talk about being customer-centric, it only makes sense to fuel our content strategy with none other than our customers. 

According to an article on the Benefits of Customer Interviews by Clint Fontanella, customer interviews can help with many things including:

• Highlighting customer pain points
• Better understanding of customer needs 
• Product/service improvement 
• Help you learn your customer's vocabulary (Crucial) 

These four points are invaluable for marketers equally and not just for product, customer service, and sales teams. 

In case you want an in-depth guide or inspiration on questions you could ask during your interview. This definitive list of B2B customer interview questions will certainly help you. 

Marketers should join the bandwagon with sales and have conversations. 

Whether it's users, buyers, or decision-makers, talking to your customers will provide golden nuggets. 

It’s good as a bonus to remember to make the interview worthwhile for your customer. Listen more, offer your customer or interviewee value, and thank them for their time. 

Roles like sales, business development, account executives, customer service, and customer success all have one thing in common. They deal with the market. Although tasks vary significantly some consistently get feedback,  others solve problems amongst many other tasks. 

With this method, you could ask about market-related topics: 

For example, salespeople may know a lot about competition and market objections. An experienced salesperson and account executive would have answers to questions like:

“What are the most common objections you receive (other than price)?” 

“Which features or value propositions resonate the most with x persona?”. 

Listen carefully and note down the answers. Make your next virtual workshop on combatting those objections or highlighting those persona-specific value propositions. 

Invite prospective customers to a virtual workshop, discuss ideas, share value, and watch the intent build. 

Whether you decide to meet someone from the customer service or the sales team, make sure you pick someone experienced if not the most experienced in your organization. Use your time well and make the most of it. Now you know who you’ll be offering a free lunch to next. Choose wisely! 

This article by Sprinklr on combining customer service & marketing to work together, really explains this in great detail. A nice reinforcement to why this can be a deal breaker for discovering amazing content. 

Think about topic clusters as well. Keyword research is great for understanding how your audience is searching for something online. Why not use those keywords to create topics? 

For some companies, ranking for high-intent keywords is gold. How would you know which topic should your virtual event cover? Think of topics around that keyword. An example follows: 

Keyword: Influencer marketing 

The topic of interest: How to find your next best YouTube influencer 

Use tools like SparkToro that will make this research easy for you. You want to know what other relatable keywords your audience searches for. SparkToro will find those topics with ease.  

In this example, the audience that searches for “influencer marketing” also happens to search for “influencer marketing on YouTube”. I might want to focus on a specific topic that caters to my audience. 

Virtual events present a powerful way to engage with your audience and achieve marketing goals. Their cost-effectiveness, scalability, and engaging nature make them an attractive way to generate buyer intent and more importantly, craft a relationship. By leveraging the insights gleaned from customer interviews, feedback from customer-facing teams, and keyword research, you can craft virtual events that deeply resonate with your audience.