Four ways to improve your seminars

Seminars have been ?a mainstay of legal marketing for as long ?as anyone can remember. ?In pre-internet days they were ?a good way to provide clients, contacts, and prospects with general advice and legislative updates, information that couldn’t really be found anywhere else. 

The only trouble is now it can: the internet hosts a myriad of blogs, essays, articles, and FAQs, and the vast majority of firms now offer free initial consultations. 

Below are four ways you can improve your seminars so that they generate a higher commercial return on the investment you have made in creating and delivering them.

1. Improve your delivery

One of the things that puts people off attending seminars is the way they are presented. Firms still choose their most senior and experienced fee earners to present, rather than those who are actually good at presenting.

When it comes to seminars, success is all about engagement, and that engagement simply will not be achieved if the presenter is glued to a podium in front of text-heavy slides. 

If your seminars are going to be an attractive option, choose your most natural and most enthusiastic presenters and invest in a little presentation skills training to make them even better. 

2. Improve your angle

The lure of using seminars ?to highlight your technical expertise is probably strong, ?but it is the wrong thing to do ?if you are going to (a) make your seminar sound like one your audience actually wants to attend, and (b) genuinely engage your audience when they get there.

It has repeatedly been proven that people want information that is relevant to them. They want presenters to highlight the issues that trouble them and provide practical workable solutions that will resolve those issues. They don’t want to hear about the latest change in legislation in minute detail.

If you want to create a loyal audience, make sure all of your presentations are relevant, direct, and – most of all – practical. 

3. Improve the format

What image does the word ‘seminar’ engender for you? ?Does it make you think relevant, direct, and practical, or does it make you think of a complex lecture delivered in a dusty classroom? If it’s the latter, maybe it’s time to explore new formats. 

One simple change you can make is to change the word ‘seminar’ to ‘workshop’. Immediately, this sounds less formal and more interactive. 

However, if this is to be more than window dressing, you will need to tweak your format more substantively. Try facilitated break-out sessions to work through a case study before regrouping to discuss findings. Not only does this well and truly tick the ‘practical’ box, it also allows more of your fee earners to get close to your attendees. 

Other options include roundtable discussions, where you discuss and debate current issues with a smaller, more focused group, and questions and answers, which allow your audience to ask about issues ?that are currently bothering them. Both give you a much more interactive format that ?will better hold your invitees’ attention while you showcase why they should be instructing you or referring work to you. 

It’s also worth noting that ?both formats require much less preparation, which makes them more time efficient, as well ?as more productive, than ?a traditional seminar. 

4. Improve the delivery mechanism

One barrier to seminar attendance is lack of time. ?If that’s an objection you are coming up against, try to use technology to your benefit.

Video conferencing is one option, and most platforms ?now allow for multiple links. ?The downside is that the live ?plus technology equation ?can increase the likelihood ?of something going awry. ?From the relationship perspective, the fact you ?are not in the room will make genuine engagement harder ?to create. 

MP4 delivery is another alternative. Platforms such as GoToWebinar allow you to ?create electronic files you can add to your website, or send out to clients and prospects so that they can watch the session ?when it’s convenient for them.

Or it may be worth eschewing any type of personal delivery. Instead you can distil your key messages into fact sheets to send out to contacts (perhaps alongside an offer to deliver a short workshop specifically for their team) and add to your website, boosting your search engine optimisation and giving you an anchor you can use to drive new traffic to the relevant pages on your site.

Douglas McPherson is a director at Size 10½ Boots @sizetenandahalf  www.tenandahalf.co.uk