Whether the legal marketing strategy for your law firm revolves around online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing wallet share of a solid growth of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you should make the best of the material that you manage to produce. Following are several ideas to help 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’ve produced any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the formats mentioned, don’t just send it out once or print it and let it stagnate in your reception area. You should distribute that content as much as is possible. For every piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto our website?
- Have I emailed 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 firm aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client asks?
- Can I turn it into a different type of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented only once and then left to become stale. The large amount of time involved in preparing them results in just one presentation. If you want to get much more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I present it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our 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?
- Could 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 to discuss topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
Although these suggestions 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 necessary to consider that it is far easier to add a tiny amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the results of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you 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.