If the marketing strategy for your law firm depends on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of a solid growth of clients, you’ll need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you should make the best of the material you can produce. Here are some quick suggestions for making sure you use the two most commonly 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 created any worthwhile, interesting material of any of the types mentioned, don’t just send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception. You ought to distribute that content as broadly as is possible. For each item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded onto our website?
- Have I emailed it direct to people who have referred me, associates and other professionals?
- Have I linked to it with a post on Facebook and a tweet on Twitter?
- Has it been sent to media contacts?
- Are others in the firm aware of it and could they explain it further if a client asks about it?
- Can I transform it into another kind of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally prepared with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented only once and then left to stagnate. The large amount of time involved in preparing it gets just one presentation. To get 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 our website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation to people 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 from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While a lot of these suggestions may seem like more work at a time when you’ve possibly created a dent in your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s necessary to remember that it is far easier to add a tiny amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the results of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you need to create some content you will feel more positive 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.