Hosting a webinar is an excellent PR tactic for lawyers, but there’s one major drawback: the time it takes to watch them. No matter how much information you pack into your webinar or how much you promote it, the fact of the matter is that not everyone in your target audience will have time to watch it live. The number of viewers you attract will always be limited by each person’s individual schedule.
That doesn’t mean you should give up on webinars, however. It just means you should find new ways to extend their reach and track ROI.
Focus on Quality of Attendees, Not Quantity
The most obvious way to measure the ROI of your webinar is to track how many people attended it. But this metric may not be the best marker of success, mostly because of the scheduling challenges mentioned above.
According to GoToWebinar, most webinar hosts aren’t attracting massive audiences: 78 percent have less than 50 attendees. If your webinars don’t have a ton of viewers, you aren’t alone, and it doesn’t necessarily mean your efforts are wasted.
Certainly, it’s good practice to set registration and attendance goals as part of your law firm public relations strategy. But instead of focusing solely on the number of viewers, focus on how engaged they are. If people stick around to the end of the webinar and ask questions during the Q&A portion, that’s a good sign that they’re interested in what you have to offer. Even if just one person tunes in, if they decide to hire your firm as a result, your efforts will have been worth it. Remember, it’s about quality over quantity.
Another metric that’s potentially more valuable than the number of attendees is where those attendees are coming from. Did people find your webinar and sign up through your website, your email newsletter or your social media? Or did they discover it through a colleague or in-person event? Tracking this information can help you figure out where high-quality leads are being generated and the best way to reach them.
Leverage Your Webinar After It Goes Live
If you still aren’t satisfied with the number of people you reached with your webinar, you can easily double or triple that number by leveraging it after the fact. You’ve already invested time to create your webinar slides and script; repurpose what you have to develop new content that even more people will engage with. Here are some ideas:
- Choose an evergreen topic: First and foremost, don’t choose a webinar topic that focuses on an event or trend that’s going to be stale in a week. Pick a subject that will be relevant for many months to come so you can reuse the content over and over again.
- Post it to YouTube or SlideShare: Unless you’re planning on hosting the same webinar again, your webinar should always be posted to YouTube, SlideShare or another content sharing platform of your choice. This allows more people to find your content and it makes it easier for attendees to share your webinar with their contacts.
- Turn it into an article or e-book: Compile the information in your webinar into an article or e-book, then post it on your website as a free resource to visitors. Ask them to enter their email before downloading the report and you’ll instantly beef up your email list—a strategy that law firm PR pros use all the time.
- Write a series of blog posts: Your webinar is likely divided up into sections and each of these sections makes a perfect blog post. Simply expand on what you’ve written in your slides and you’ll have a post that practically writes itself. If you don’t have time for an entire blog series, you can post the webinar transcript, which is great for SEO.
- Use key takeaways for social media: Pull out the most important snippets of information from the webinar and use them as the basis for social media posts. Put quotes and stats into graphics using a design platform such as Canva or create an infographic that’s easily shareable on your profiles.
- Send a pitch to media: Prospects and clients aren’t the only people interested in your webinar content—reporters are, too. Find a timely, interesting angle and turn your webinar into a media pitch to send to journalists. You can get your firm’s name in front of thousands more people with the right quote or bylined article.
As with any public relations content—articles, blogs, white papers, etc.—it’s important to look at additional ways to extend reach so you can maximize your efforts and generate more visibility among your target audience.
