If the legal marketing strategy for your law company 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, without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you need to make the most of the writing you manage to produce. Following are some ideas to help you use the two most reliably produced types of legal marketing content as best you can.
Law Firm Marketing – Written material (blogs, email alerts, brochures, guides, information sheets)
If you’ve created some worthwhile, interesting material in 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 broadly as is possible. For every item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- 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?
- Is everyone in my company aware of it and can they explain it further if a client has queries about it?
- Can I turn it into a different style of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually written with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented only once then left to become stale. All of the effort and time required to prepare it results in only a one time presentation. If you want to get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else may I present it to?
- How can 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 couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Can I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it electronically online or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog to discuss topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
Although a lot of these ideas may feel like additional 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 is necessary to remember that it’s much easier to use a tiny amount of time at the end to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve 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 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.