Whether the legal marketing strategy for your law firm depends on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing wallet share of your stable of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is an essential dynamic of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you need to make the most of the material that you manage to produce. Here are some ideas for making sure you use two of the most commonly produced types of legal marketing content as best you can.
Law Firm Marketing – Written material (blogs, email alerts, brochures, guides, information sheets)
If you have created some worthwhile, interesting material in any of the forms mentioned, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and let it stagnate in your reception area. You can distribute the content as much as is possible. For each piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded to our website?
- Have I sent it directly to people who have referred me, associates and other professionals?
- Have I linked it with a post on Facebook and a tweet on Twitter?
- Has it been sent to media contacts?
- Are others in my firm aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client asks?
- Can I transform it into another kind of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented only once then left to become stale. All of that effort and time involved in preparing it gets just one presentation. If you want to get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I show it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to those who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it electronically online or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog discussing questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
Although some of these ideas may seem like more work just when you’ve possibly damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s important to consider that it is much easier to add a small amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the benefits of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you create some content you’ll feel more confident about how effective the results will be.
John Gray is a practising lawyer and the Senior Marketer at John Gray Marketing, an Australian specialist law firm and legal marketing consultancy. If you are interested in law marketing, legal marketing and marketing for lawyers, contact John Gray today.