Whether 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 the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you should make the best of the material that you manage to produce. Here are just a few suggestions for making sure you use the two most popularly 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 written any quality, interesting material of any of the types mentioned, don’t only send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception. You ought to distribute the content as much as possible. For every piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto our website?
- Have I sent it direct 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?
- Are others in the firm aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client asks about it?
- Can I transform it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally prepared with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented once and then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing it gets only a one time presentation. To get much more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies could I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy 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 discussing questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
While these suggestions may 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’s essential to consider that it is far easier to use a tiny amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you create some 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.