Tips for Putting on a Successful Webinar for Your Firm

A webinar is an online presentation meant to provide the audience with valuable information. Thought leadership is vital to positioning lawyers as experts in their practice areas which is why a webinar is an ideal opportunity to share your law firm’s specialized knowledge.

Typically a webinar consists of a presenter speaking while the audience listens, follows along with the slideshow, and ask questions. This is a cost-effective and time-efficient way to share your firm’s expertise with many people at the same time.  As we already wrote, webinars are one of ways your law firm can gain quality leads. Even if you watch and listen to webinars from other companies you may be unsure of how to implement this type of content in a way that works for your firm. Here are some suggestions. 

Planning

Choose a topic. This can be the most difficult part of hosting a webinar. Consider your firm’s practice areas and expertise and remember that webinars are meant to teach not merely discuss ideas. Look at new legislation and explain how it might impact your clients. Discuss the the legal process for certain certain types of cases. Ask yourself, what types of information will be valuable to my clients? Webinars are a great platform for answering frequently asked questions.

Select a guest. If you want to be the expert on your webinar you can be, but it may be beneficial to have a guest speaker as well. This will also bring in more attendees from the guest’s connections. It also provides a more dynamic engagement during the webinar. 

Determine your target audience. In order to give a relevant presentation and market the webinar properly you must understand who your audience will be. Depending on the topic it may be all your clients or clients interested in a specific practice area.

Create a landing page. It’s necessary to have a landing page on your website that lets individuals fill out a form to subscribe to your webinar. This can also act as a “Watch the Recording” page after your webinar has gone live.

Decide on a platform to host your webinar on. There are many viable sites like On24, GoToMeeting, and Adobe Connect which we discussed in our last legal marketing tools blog post.

Going Live

The first tip to hosting a professional level webinar is good audio Don’t rely on your laptop’s microphone function or simply dial into the meeting space. A quality microphone will be an investment for all your law firm’s future webinars and podcasts.

Next, remember to be conversational during your presentation. Although seminars may seem more formal, you don’t just want to just speak at your audience. This is why including at least one more person in your webinar can help set a conversational pace.

Following Up

When the webinar ends, the marketing opportunities are just beginning. First, it’s important convert your webinar landing page into a “Watch the Recording” page so that clients who want to refer back to the webinar or those who missed the live recording have a place to turn to. 

Then, send follow-up emails to all of the subscribers. 

Finally, repurpose the webinar content. As we’ve said before, Create Once, Publish Everywhere. Once the webinar is over, you now have slides and ideas that can be converted into blog posts, YouTube videos, SlideShare, and continuously shared on your social media networks.