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 generate content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content means hard work, and you should make the most of the writing you can produce. Following are just a few suggestions to help you use the two most commonly 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 written any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the forms above, don’t only send it out once or print it and let it sit in your reception. Distribute the 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?
- Has it been loaded onto our website?
- Have I sent it directly 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 asks about it?
- Can I turn it into another type of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented only once and then left to become stale. All of the time involved in preparing it gets only a one time presentation. To get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else may I present it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation to people who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Can I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it electronically online or directly?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog discussing questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While some of these suggestions might feel like additional work just when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is necessary to consider that it’s far easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve 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 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.