If the marketing strategy for your law company depends on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of your stable of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you must make the best of the material you can produce. Here are several ideas for making sure you use the two most popularly produced types of legal marketing content as effectively as you can.
Law Firm Marketing – Written material (blogs, email alerts, brochures, guides, information sheets)
If you have written some worthwhile, interesting material of any of the types mentioned, don’t only send it off once or print it and let it sit in your office. You should distribute the content as broadly as is possible. For every piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded to my website?
- Have I sent it direct to referrers, 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?
- Is everyone in my company aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client questions them?
- Can I turn it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented only once then left to stagnate. All of the time required to prepare them gets just one presentation. If you want to get much more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else may I present it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation to people who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Can I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it electronically online or directly?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog discussing questions that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While a lot of these ideas might feel like additional work at a time when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s necessary to remember that it’s much easier to add a small amount of time at the end to really maximise on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you create content you’ll feel more confident about how effective that content 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.