To best market their practices, lawyers share their experience and knowledge through hosting podcasts, speaking at conferences, and creating detailed website content.
Attorneys have had to find creative ways to reach out to existing clients and new ones, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to create complications for many businesses. One such example includes webinars. While lawyers may have overlooked them in the past due to other time-consuming priorities, many business world leaders have used webinars. Law firm webinars have helped attorneys improve relationships with existing clientele, position their firms as leading authorities, generate leads and engagement, start conversations and answer questions, educate their target audience, and reach out to possible new clients.
Law firm webinars can quickly and effectively help legal firms address problems clients may face.
How Do Law Firm Webinars Work?
Like in-person events, webinars allow attendees to listen to speakers and view presentations via phone or online video. Interactivity is one of the main features of a live webinar, which gives people the ability to send, receive, and discuss information instantly.
Law firm webinars are not merely informational videos, which can be confusing to some people. For instance, you could be looking for a webinar online, and instead, find a pre-recorded video of a presenter talking into a camera. Webinars are always interactive, while informational videos are not. A slide show on YouTube, for example, isn’t a webinar. However, informational videos can still be an essential component of your marketing strategy and should not be discounted.
Webinars can be recorded for people to watch later or presented to an entirely live audience.
Some law firms will host their webinars using platforms developed by third-party companies, including Workcast, ON24, Zoom, GoToWebinar, and Adobe Connect. Webinars can enhance your firm’s thought leadership and generate leads.
You’re probably wondering where you should start. Here are a few tips you can use to help promote and plan a webinar for your law firm:
1. Select the type of webinar you would like to use
There is no one-size-fits-all scenario when it comes to webinars. Thought leadership webinars have been proven to educate clients and get messages across to clients by offering valuable information on challenging issues.
Webinars for law firms can provide an outline of a new or recently revised law that may pertain to your clients, like a state’s statute of limitations or laws regarding negligence. Hands-on training webinars can help you explain more complex issues more efficiently. Examples include teaching the essential steps to take when filing a VA benefits appeal, or a step-by-step process for filling out workers’ compensation forms.
2. Prepare valuable quality content
While webinars are an excellent tool for marketing your law firm, they should not be the driving force of your content. If you take the time to answer questions, educate, and inform participants, you will be providing even more value to your customers, which will help you generate leads.
You could have a lawyer who may be well-qualified to cover a particular topic, but you might decide to use a guest speaker to provide additional value on that topic. Guest speakers can also provide more variety for your law firm webinars.
You and your guests may have the content presented on screen. Some people alternatively learn best with written materials. Visual aids should be considered for practical topics like filling in forms to get key learning points across to others. You need to make your content easy to understand, practical, actionable, and audible, regardless of how you wish to present it.
3. Set up a registration platform to promote your webinar
To promote your law firm webinar, you’ll need to set up a landing page that persuades potential clientele to register for your event. While this step is crucial, some lawyers have become a little hesitant. With the right software, including templates and some reliable legal firm marketing support, you should have little trouble creating a landing page.
Make sure your landing page includes information pertinent to the type of webinar you will be hosting (speaker, time, date, etc.), as well as space for attendees to include their contact information. You must also communicate to your audience what they can expect to learn in the webinar. Broughton Partner’s registration landing page for our upcoming Mass Torts 101 Webinar is a great example of how to display a well-designed landing page.
4. Host webinars with Q&A sessions
Law firm webinars can be as short as 15-20 minutes up to around 3 hours long. Most webinars are close to 20-40 minutes long. It’s recommended that you try to keep your webinar as short as possible. It can be daunting to put on a two-hour webinar if you are a busy lawyer.
Webinars that are focused and short, such as a 10-minute presentation with a 10-minute Q&A session, take a short amount of time to prepare and have been proven to be quite useful.
If you plan on featuring a guest speaker, you can run the webinar a little longer, as long as you facilitate the Q&A and the learning points.
If there are too many questions to answer during the Q&A session, you can use their questions for future webinar topics or follow up with participants offline.
5. Follow up
Webinars alone won’t generate a lot of business from potential clients. Anyone who registered or attended your law firm webinar is now considered a lead. Make sure your follow-up strategy documents the steps you plan on taking after the webinar. You will need to figure out who will contact the attendees and what types of emails they will receive. You will also need to determine how you plan on treating the attendees who showed up for the webinar versus the ones that registered but did not show up. Make sure the webinar is recorded so this resource can be offered as a follow-up later on.
6. Use the webinar for campaign generation
After you have recorded a webinar for your law firm, it can be used for lead generation or as a resource for clients. From the resources section on your website, add a link to your webinar and make sure it is gated so that people can only access it once they have provided your firm with their contact information. Likewise, your webinar recording can also be used in an email nurturing campaign. Before conducting a law firm webinar, think about other ways it can be used once it’s over.
Is Your Law Firm Looking For Ways to Connect with New Clients?
There are numerous marketing strategies and ideas that a law firm can try, and many of them will provide a high ROI. Many attorneys see lead generation as a quick and easy way to fill the gap in their client pool. However, the leads your law firm will receive are not always qualified and could lead to a dead end. That’s where Broughton Partners comes in. We provide law firms with qualified mass tort claimants that meet your firm’s specific case criteria.
For more information about our client acquisition services, contact our team today at (800) 949-8904 or fill out a contact form.