Don’t treat webinars as one-time thought leadership/business development events. Look at them as source material for more than a dozen derivative pieces of thought-leadership content.

Attorneys and law firms have been slow to embrace webinars as the thought leadership/business development tools that other professionals and organizations consider them to be.

Webinars are an effective way to get in front of past, current, and prospective clients and referral sources, and show those audiences that the attorneys and firms hosting the webinars have knowledge of particular areas of law that would be beneficial to those clients and referral sources.

Webinars are also a great way to begin building a personal connection with those audiences. That’s because they are hearing the presenters’ voices, likely seeing their faces, and in the course of both, getting to know the presenters better than if they were simply reading the presenters’ writing.

More recently, COVID-19 caused an explosion of attorneys and law firms hosting webinars focused on COVID-19-related topics.

For attorneys and firms who were not already on the webinar bandwagon, they are seeing how webinars can, inexpensively, serve as thought leadership/business development tools laser-focused on particular topics or areas of law that the attorneys and firms want to market their knowledge of, and for which they want to be perceived as thought leaders.

But all too often, attorneys and their firms treat webinars as “one and done” endeavors.

They’ll host a webinar.

Maybe they’ll record it and send an email to their email marketing list about the recording.

And that’s probably it.

Rarely do attorneys and law firms see their webinars for what they truly are: source material for a multitude of derivative thought leadership and business development content pieces.

Here are 16 ways you and your law firm can use your webinar content to create new thought leadership/business development content.

(I’ve divided these 16 ways into three categories: (i) repurposing the actual webinar content; (ii) creating derivative thought-leadership content from the webinar; and (iii) creating business development content from the webinar, such as lead generation items.)

Repurposing the webinar

  1. Post the webinar on YouTube (assuming of course that you’ve recorded it, which I recommend you do)
  2. Rip the audio and create a podcast episode that is just the audio from the webinar
  3. Create a transcript of the webinar and publish it online
  4. Upload the slides you used in the webinar to SlideShare

Derivative thought-leadership content

  1. Create blog posts based on the topics your attorney(s) presented on the webinar
  2. Create blog posts based on questions attendees asked during the Q&A portion of the webinar
  3. Create videos based on the topics your attorney(s) presented on the webinar
  4. Create videos based on questions attendees asked during the Q&A portion of the webinar
  5. Livestream a video (on Facebook Live, LinkedIn, Periscope, etc.) with your attorney(s) discussing the topics they presented on the webinar
  6. Livestream a video with your attorney(s) discussing questions attendees asked during the Q&A portion of the webinar
  7. Publish these derivative forms of content on your firm’s social media channels
  8. Turn quotes from these derivative forms of content into visuals that can be posted on your firm’s social media channels

Business development/lead generation materials

  1. Create an email marketing campaign around the webinar, including emailing past, current, and prospective clients and referral sources about the availability of a recording of the webinar
  2. Design an infographic based on what was discussed during the webinar
  3. Create an e-book
  4. Create a checklist

That’s 16 different ways you can repurpose your firm’s most recent webinar into thought leadership/business development content that shows your past, current, and prospective clients and referral sources that you and your law firm can help them with the legal issues they may be facing.

There are certainly even more things that you can do with your webinar. But these 16 should keep you and your colleagues busy for a bit.

Wayne Pollock is the founder of Copo Strategies, a legal services and communications firm, and the Law Firm Editorial Service, a ghostwriting service for attorneys and their law firms. The Law Firm Editorial Service crafts BigLaw-quality attorney-written thought-leadership marketing content for attorneys so that they can market themselves while staying billable.

Do you have any idea how much revenue your law firm is missing out on by its attorneys writing their own thought-leadership marketing content? Visit WriteLessBillMore.com for instant access to a free Thought Leadership Cost Calculator.