When creating a marketing strategy for your estate planning law firm, emails, social channels, and your website are probably top of mind.
Still, estate planning marketing can leave out two of the most effective methods of connecting to your clients: seminars and webinars. They can be powerful law firm marketing strategies because they let you connect with clients and boost long-term growth.
Why Are Seminars and Webinars So Helpful for Estate Planning Marketing?
One way to stand out in a competitive field like estate planning is to show your experience. Seminars and webinars can be one of the most efficient ways to turn a potential client into one who purchases your services.
Let’s discuss the benefits and drawbacks of adding seminars and webinars to your estate planning marketing strategy. This will help determine if it makes sense for your law firm.
You Can Build Credibility in Your Practice Area
One of the first things you’ll learn about marketing for estate planning attorneys is the importance of valuable content. Every attorney should include value in their estate planning marketing strategy. One way to do that is to build credibility in your practice area with seminars and webinars. You’ll be able to break down complex topics into easy-to-understand talks, displaying your thought leadership and expertise for your clients.
You Can Increase Awareness of Your Brand
Given the competitive nature of estate planning, it’s important to differentiate yourself from your competitors through brand awareness. By creating buzz around a seminar or webinar, you can increase your reach for potential clients who may not have otherwise known about your law firm.
You Can Diversify Your Law Firm’s Marketing Strategies
Having articles on your blog is one way to reach new clients, but to increase your reach, consider diversifying your content. You can create written content like blogs and emails, plus visual content like pre-recorded webinars or in-person seminars.
Related: 5 Best Website Designs for Estate Planning Lawyers
You Can Build Your Network
No matter what business you’re in, building a network is crucial. From other attorneys or marketing specialists to professionals in different fields, you’ll want to get to know them all. You never know where your next client will come from. Seminars and webinars are great ways to get to know people on a more personal level.
You Can Use Client Information for Email Marketing
When planning your seminar or webinar, you will need to create a campaign that lets people know when and where they can attend. While it takes some effort, you can build a robust email marketing list this way. Then, you can periodically send prospective clients updates about your firm.
You Can Repurpose Your Content
When brainstorming estate planning marketing ideas for your webinars and seminars, you can look to previously existing content to get a head start. Topics from your blog, for example, can be expanded and given a new life.
Seminars and Webinars Are Gaining Popularity
Ever since the pandemic, the popularity of virtual events has skyrocketed, and they’re projected to increase by 18% by 2030. However, in-person events have also not lost their importance, as people still crave in-person connections.
What Are Some of the Challenges?
While seminars and webinars can be a great addition to your law firm marketing strategies, you should keep some of these common challenges in mind. Seminars and webinars may not be used as often because, let’s face it, they are time-consuming and can be costly. For webinars, scripting, filming, and live streaming can be time-consuming. There’s also a learning curve when it comes to creating video content, live streaming, and feeling natural talking on camera. In-person seminars can be expensive when you consider the cost of renting a venue, travel, and possible hotel accommodations. There’s also the additional work ahead of time to promote your upcoming seminars and webinars, but these campaigns are essential for estate planning marketing.
With that being said, seminars and webinars have many benefits that we believe outweigh many of the challenges you may face. So, what are some estate planning marketing ideas that successfully incorporate seminars and webinars?
Steps for Creating a Successful Seminar or Webinar for Your Estate Planning Business
Let’s examine the steps you should take to successfully plan, host, and market a seminar or webinar.
1. Choose Your Topic
Whether you’re new to marketing or feel like you are incredibly familiar with your firm’s needs, coming up with estate planning marketing ideas is always a necessary step. Having areas of expertise and knowing your audience are two of the most important areas to consider when brainstorming. These are a few additional things to consider:
- Are there any relevant events or milestones coming up in your industry or business?
- What is a complex topic that can be better broken down through a seminar or webinar?
- What is a topic your audience needs more clarification on?
- What is a topic that is interactive and could promote discussion?
Some of these points require in-depth knowledge of your industry or audience, so if you still need to do market research, consider this an opportunity. Once you have your idea in place, it’s time to move on to the next step.
2. Figure Out Where Your Seminar or Webinar Will Be Held
Now that you’ve come up with the idea, you can better figure out which channel is best to communicate with your clients. These are some of the questions you can ask yourself:
- Do I want to do an in-person or virtual seminar?
- If it’s in-person, where will it be held? What capacity venue will I need?
- If it’s virtual, will it be live or pre-recorded?
- Where can people watch my webinar? A webinar hosting site or social media?
- What type of webinar will it be? Educational, panel-style, interactive?
- Will I need to collaborate with any colleagues or speakers?
These questions should help you better understand how you want to approach your event, but remember to try to be as interactive and informative as possible, whichever method you decide to choose.
3. Market Your Seminar or Webinar
Promoting your seminar or webinar is vital to ensure people know about your event so that they can attend. Create promotional posts across social channels and a landing page where people can sign up with their email addresses. Once they’ve signed up, you will want to have an automated “Thank you” email with details about the event, and don’t forget to follow up with a couple of emails as reminders before the day of the seminar.
Be cautious about overdoing it. This could make some attendees put your emails in the spam folder before attending. Across all channels, keep in mind the marketing rule of 7, which suggests customers need to be exposed to your brand at least 7 times before they buy.
Related: LSAs for Estate Planning Lawyers
4. Follow Up With Attendees
You’ve successfully done a seminar or webinar! Congratulations. After the event, make sure to send out a thank you email to all your attendees. For webinars, you can also allow clients to download the webinar if you recorded it. The event has likely added more emails to your list, so continue the attorney-client relationship through informative email marketing.
I have been following Juris Digital for years on social media and reading all blog materials to better understand the brand. Juris has an impeccable reputation for results and performance. Our firm needed a leader in the industry to showcase the firm and have a create/result mentality.
— Attorney Jay Rooth
Contact Juris Digital Today for Help Marketing Your Seminar or Webinar
That was a lot, and we have still only covered the surface of seminars and webinars for estate planning. Our team specializes in developing tailored marketing campaigns for law firms across multiple practice areas. Let us handle the marketing while you focus on what really matters—offering the best services possible to your clients and maintaining those relationships.
Click here to get in touch with Juris Digital, and we will get to work on creating your custom seminar or webinar strategy today.
