If the marketing strategy for your law company 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 generate content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you must make the most of the writing that you manage to produce. Here are some suggestions to help 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 have written any worthwhile, interesting material of any of the types above, you don’t need to only send it out once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your office. Distribute the content as widely as possible. For each item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto my website?
- Have I emailed it directly to referrers, 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?
- Is everyone in the firm aware of it and could they explain it further if a client asks about it?
- Can I turn it into a different style of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally prepared with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented only once and then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare it results in just one showing. If you want to get much more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else could I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy to people who couldn’t 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 followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While these suggestions may feel like more work at a time when you’ve possibly created a dent in your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is important to remember that it is far easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you need to create 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.