Whether the legal marketing strategy for your law firm is based 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 generate content.
Content is an essential dynamic of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you need to make the best of the material you can produce. Following are some suggestions to help you use two of the most popularly 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 produced some worthwhile, interesting material of any of the formats above, you don’t need to just send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your office. You ought to distribute that content as widely as possible. For every item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto our website?
- Have I sent it directly to referrers, 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?
- Is everyone in my firm aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client has queries about it?
- Can I transform it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented once then left to become stale. The large amount of time involved in preparing it gets only a one time showing. To get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else may I show it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our 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 couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it via email 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 who attended the presentation?
While some of these ideas may seem 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 crucial to remember that it’s much easier to use a tiny 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.
Increase the benefits of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you need to create content you will 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.