If the marketing strategy for your law company is based on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing wallet share of your stable of clients, you will need to generate content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content requires hard work, and you want to make the best of the writing that you can produce. Following are some quick suggestions to help you use the two most reliably 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 created any quality, interesting material of any of the types mentioned, don’t only send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your office. You should distribute that content as widely as possible. For each item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded to my 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 can they explain it in detail if a client asks?
- Can I transform it into a different style of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually prepared with a specific 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 that effort and time involved in preparing them results in just one presentation. To get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else could I show it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to people who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Could 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 from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While some of these ideas may feel like more work just 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 necessary to remember that it’s far easier to use a small 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.
Maximise the benefits of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you need to create some content you will feel more confident 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.