If the legal marketing strategy for your law firm depends on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing wallet share of your stable of clients, you’ll need to generate content.
Content is an essential part 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 that you can produce. Following are some suggestions for making sure you use the two 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 any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the formats mentioned, you don’t need to only send it out once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception area. You can distribute the content as broadly as possible. For each item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded to my website?
- Have I sent it direct 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?
- Are others in the company aware of it and can they explain it further if a client questions them?
- Can I transform it into another type of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally prepared with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented only once then left to become stale. The large amount of time involved in preparing it results in just one showing. If you want to get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I show it to?
- How could 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 couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Can 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 discussing questions that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While some of these ideas may feel like more work at a time when you’ve possibly damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is important to consider that it is much easier to use a small amount of time now to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you need to create some content you’ll 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.