Speaker 1: 0:05

What is the role of webinars in legal marketing and how can they actually generate new leads for my practice? Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen. Webinars have long been a really powerful tool in the marketing industry, and for legal marketers specifically. They give law firms a really dynamic way to educate potential clients and industry peers alike. Unlike more traditional methods, webinars allow us, as firms and as marketers, to really dive deep into more complex legal topics, break them down into more digestible insights that can actually resonate with either a seasoned professional or just the everyday person that's looking for guidance. This type of educational approach doesn't just position the firm as a valuable resource, but it helps us establish credibility, both personally and professionally, by showcasing our expertise in specific areas of the law.

Speaker 1: 1:01

One of the key strengths here is the ability to build trust and authority. We've talked about this a bunch on the podcast and it is really important, and there are a lot of ways I like to do it. There are a lot of ways I don't like to do it, but the reality is that when a law firm hosts a webinar, it's a great opportunity to demonstrate our actual thought leadership and share our real world knowledge in a live, interactive format. Attendees don't have to just be passive listeners here. They're not just listening to a podcast or viewing a video. They're actively engaging with you. They can ask questions, they're absorbing the material, and this all helps us foster a stronger connection with the potential client, and this can be really impactful in the legal field, where clients really want to know that they're working with someone who is both knowledgeable and accessible. Webinars also give us the advantage of reaching a wider audience while still addressing very niche topics. Whether we're just talking about recent regulatory changes in a corporate sense, or we're looking at case studies in specific practice areas and breaking them down, or just offering guidance on common legal problems or challenges, firms can tailor their content that attracts a specific audience. So if we have a webinar, for example, that could be set up as an educational session on estate planning basics for families, and then we could also do something like a Q&A about business law for entrepreneurs, or even a panel discussion that features a bunch of different attorneys that are sharing insights on employment law trends or debating about a particular area of family law trends or debating about a particular area of family law. Even though webinars are just one format of content, we can actually leverage a whole bunch of different formats of the information we share. So everything from educational presentations, interactive Q&A, case studies, expert panels, powerpoint presentations, webinars can be molded to cater to different learning preferences, interests and different types of clients, and this versatility makes them incredibly useful in your marketing strategy, because it drives engagement, it expands reach and, ultimately, it delivers content to clients that they really want to hear.

Speaker 1: 3:10

And webinars offer a bunch of different benefits beyond potential conversions. They offer us all these different types of benefits for legal marketing. So this starts with their ability to help us educate potential clients on more complex topics in an accessible way where they can actually ask questions. By breaking down these intricate legal concepts into much clearer understandable language, webinars help us demystify the law and empower our potential clients to make more informed decisions. And this educational approach not only helps build rapport, but it also helps provide valuable takeaways that the attendees are likely to remember and share. And it's likely to prevent some headaches for you in the future, when clients inevitably WebMD themselves and try to figure out what's wrong.

Speaker 1: 3:57

And I know we've talked about this before. But credibility and trust are still fundamental here, and webinars are really excellent for building trust with these potential clients. So not only are we helping them understand the issues better and getting them to understand that we have great expertise on this, but we can actually start building credibility, we can build trust with them. They can see us face to face, and there are plenty of tools that do this. But webinars are live and so that authority helps us a lot. And if we host webinars on specialized topics or recent developments or news webinars, this helps us position ourselves as authorities in the field, not just on the case law, but on everything that's going on. When a law firm is consistently delivering insightful content, up-to-date, ever content or evergreen content, it reassures potential clients and your audience that they're dealing with experts who are not only knowledgeable but also committed to keeping everyone the entire audience and the public informed.

Speaker 1: 4:57

And I know I'm starting to sound a little bit like a broken record, but webinars also offer the advantage of helping us expand our reach pretty significantly. Unlike these in-person events, webinars are helping us break down geographical barriers. Obviously, during COVID we had a lot of restrictions, and now we can connect with firms from either different regions who couldn't attend a traditional seminar, or we can connect with people who just don't have the time to go in person and go to the seminar, and this ability to reach a wider audience, with really no limits to how wide it can get, obviously increases our visibility and it can even open the door to some new markets. At the end of the day, the most important thing here is that webinars are cost effective, especially when we compare them to a lot of other lead generation strategies. When we're comparing them to in-person events, we've got costs for venues, travel materials, maybe panel speakers, all of that kind of stuff. On the other side of this, webinars, you have your laptop, you invest in some webinar software, which might be a couple hundred bucks, and you're off and running. This lower cost structure helps us host webinars more frequently, and this maximizes the effort we can make with these without breaking the bank on generating leads. Here Using webinars effectively, though, for lead generation specifically, we need to take a little bit of a strategic approach that maximizes each phase of this before, during and after the webinar.

Speaker 1: 6:20

So let's break down how to optimize each step. Let's get to the meat of this and turn our webinars into powerful lead generating tools. Success here really starts with setting clear objectives for your webinar. So first we want to ask ourselves what we want to achieve. Are we introducing a new service? Are we addressing some common concerns and just trying to generate more clients for, like, estate planning or employment law? Clarifying our goal is going to help us shape the content for all of the webinar, all of the phases of this, and it'll help us attract the right audience. If our objective is to just generate consults for a new law service, our content needs to be practical legal tips for entrepreneurs or dealing with specific business law and partnership disputes.

Speaker 1: 7:03

Registration forms are the first step in all of this and these can be used to segment the leads. We've talked about segmenting leads before on the podcast. Go back and check out those episodes. By asking a couple of targeted questions on the registration form, like area of concern, business size, whatever it is you'll start to understand your audience better and you'll be able to tailor the webinar content accordingly. So, even if you've already got your idea, you can make some adjustments to address the audience you'll be speaking to. This data is also going to help you segment leads for more personalized follow-up strategies. Check out the personalized podcast episode.

Speaker 1: 7:38

Promotion is another really key factor here and we're not diving deep on this, but I will say, use your social media channels, your email campaigns, your partnerships, your network, every opportunity you have to spread the word about your webinar. Collaborating with other organizations is a good avenue, or collaborating with influencers can help broaden your reach a lot, and sometimes this can lend credibility to your event as well, especially if you have a panel going on. Get those people to help you with marketing and things like a countdown strategy, where we're ramping up our promo efforts. Maybe we literally use a countdown clock on some of our landing pages. This helps create a sense of urgency and it can encourage a few more signups.

Speaker 1: 8:22

Now we move on to during the webinar, and engagement is the name of the game when it comes to making our webinar actually interactive. So first, we want to start by having things like Q&A sessions, maybe even polls, throughout the webinar, and we usually want to have a chat feature where people can ask questions as the presentation goes on. This not only keeps participants engaged, but it helps us get some valuable insights into the needs of the participants, and this can guide our follow-up strategy as well. So if we have a large number of attendees that are asking about specific changes in some kind of regulation, this signals a strong interest in compliance topics, making those participants good candidates for further educational resources or consultations, and we can tag them as such in our email system. And we want to use the webinar as an opportunity to share some of our more valuable resources as well, or maybe some of our less valuable it's up to you to decide which but we can offer to give some downloadable content, usually something like white papers, e-books, guides. We can offer these throughout the session because it's really good for adding value and it encourages attendees to provide their contact details or more information to get access. And these resources should be really relevant to the webinar topic and specifically designed to help the audience take the next step, whether that's scheduling a consultation, attending another event, subscribing to a newsletter. We want to make sure all of these have a CTA, because the real magic happens after the webinar.

Speaker 1: 9:47

This is where follow-up strategies can turn these engaged attendees into qualified leads. So, first, the simple way to do this is to start by sending a follow-up email to all the participants, including those who registered but didn't attend. The email can contain a recording of the webinar, additional resources related to the topic, a call to action, something like a free consultation, or signing up for another webinar and if we really want to encourage immediate action, what we want to do is offer a special consultation or a limited time promotion only for webinar attendees, and that will help us encourage this action. So, if we have a discounted consult, a free legal document review any of those things for people who attended the webinar or signed up for the webinar and then book that consultation or that review within a certain timeframe, this helps us create that sense of exclusivity and it rewards participants for their engagement. And I touched on this a couple of times and we have an entire other episode about segmenting your audience for your email system.

Speaker 1: 10:48

But segmenting your attendees based on the level of engagement really takes things to a new level. So, depending on how active they were during the webinar, this can really help us tailor this follow-up approach. So, for example, if we have leads who consistently participated in polls or asked a bunch of questions, sent a bunch of messages, these could be considered warmer leads and maybe they receive a more personalized follow-up. Or we get a notation or a message to send them a more personalized follow-up, or we do something like a phone call or a custom email sequence that really drills down to the meat of what their potential issue is, and we could do things like people who didn't attend but they registered. They could receive an entirely different type of outreach. So this segment could have an emphasis on upcoming events or content that fits the interest based on the registration data. And by implementing these strategies whichever ones you implement because all of these can really work together or work on their own, but a lot of them is usually better than one or two law firms can really turn webinars into a consistent lead generation tool that doesn't just attract new prospects but helps nurture existing marketing contexts that haven't converted yet.

Speaker 1: 12:03

Now we're not getting into the technical aspects of webinars today. There are a million ways to do this, there are a million technical options and there are a million microphones that you could potentially use to speak to your audience. We're not getting into all of that today. We may get into it in a future podcast episode, but if you have questions, please feel free to reach out to me Before we go.

Speaker 1: 12:28

I also want to mention that we have a couple of webinars up on our YouTube channel. Check out the show notes for those webinars. They're talking about local SEO, some really interesting information and some really cool stuff that is still applicable, even though those webinars are from last year. So we're doing basically the same stuff as we get ready for 2025 for a bunch of different firms where we are really pushing on local SEO, making sure we have all of that juicy NAP information synced up and we have all the listings we can pushed out. So check out our local SEO episodes, check out the YouTube channel and check out those local SEO webinars. That's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out RosenAdvertisingcom for more Thanks.