If the legal marketing strategy for your law firm revolves around 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 may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you need to make the best of the material that you manage to produce. Here are just a few suggestions 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 any quality, interesting material of any of the formats mentioned, you don’t need to just send it out once or print it and let it stagnate in your office. You ought to distribute the content as much as possible. For each item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto my 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?
- Is everyone in my company aware of it and can they explain it further if a client asks?
- Can I transform it into a different style of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented only once and then left to become stale. All of that effort and time involved in preparing it gets just one presentation. If you want to get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else could I show it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to people who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it via email or directly?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog to discuss topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
Although some of these suggestions might feel like more work just 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 consider that it’s far easier to use a tiny amount of time now to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you create some content you’ll feel more positive 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.