If the 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 create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you must make the best of the material you manage to produce. Following are several suggestions for making sure you use two of the most reliably 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’ve produced any quality, interesting material of any of the forms above, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and let it sit in your office. You should distribute the content as broadly as possible. For each item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded to my 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?
- Are others in the company aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client questions them?
- Can I transform it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented once then left to become stale. All of that time required to prepare them results in only a one time presentation. If you want to get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else can I show it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation to those who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Can I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it via email or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog to discuss topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While some of these suggestions might feel like additional work at a time when you’ve probably created a dent in your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is important to consider that it’s far easier to use a small amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the benefits of all the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you 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.