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 create content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you must make the most of the material that you can produce. Here are several suggestions to help you use the two 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 formats mentioned, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception. You should distribute that content as broadly as possible. For each item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded to our website?
- Have I emailed it directly to people who have referred me, associates and other professionals?
- Have I linked it with a post on Facebook and a tweet on Twitter?
- Has it been sent to media contacts?
- Are others in my firm aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client questions them about it?
- Can I transform it into a different style of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually prepared with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once and then left to stagnate. All of the effort and time involved in preparing it gets only a one time presentation. To get more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies can I present it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to people 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 discussing questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
While some of these ideas may feel like more work just when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s necessary to remember that it is far easier to use a tiny amount of time at the end to really maximise on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you need to create some 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.