Now that you found a great topic, your next challenge is to find a speaker that will engage with your audience.
The main job of your speaker is to take your audience on a journey to discover a new topic. If executed well, your audience will come out of the other side with actionable insights that will move them towards achieving their personal or business goals.
This is how you win trust, and ultimately convert your audience into customers.
The speaker can also help you to promote the webinar, but this is not mandatory if you have a good topic your audience cares a lot about.
In this section I will go through a few options of how to find your speaker.
A well known person in your audience
If you are involved in a community with your audience, you probably have a good idea of who the influencers are inside the community. These tend to be the people that are active and valued in the community.
A speaker that is well known in your audience can help you to promote the webinar with very little effort. Promoting the webinar is probably the toughest part of organizing a webinar, so every little helps.
An expert you are already working with
Oftentimes, you may be working with 3rd party service providers to run your product.
In our freelancer taxes product, we worked closely with a partner Tax Advisor. It also happened to be the case that our Tax Advisor partner had great presentation skills and was comfortable standing in front of a larger audience. He was a perfect fit as a speaker.
Keep in mind that the speaker has an important role in taking your audience through the journey of discovering something new. It is important that the speaker has good presentation skills and is comfortable speaking to a larger audience.
A colleague
If the webinar topic is the area of expertise of 1 or 2 people in your company, you can utilize that by giving them the opportunity to speak.
This can be a win-win situation. Your colleagues can have a special moment by speaking to the people they are helping on a daily basis. Your audience will get to meet the people behind your product and deepen their relationship with your company.
You can be the speaker :)
As a founder or marketer of your product, you are likely to have a very good understanding of the topic. Don’t be afraid and get out there.
You will own the entire experience of the webinar. Once you start doing this regularly, you will get a feel for what works and what doesn’t. With every iteration you will improve the quality of the webinar and will win the trust of your audience.