If the marketing strategy for your law firm is based on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of a solid growth of clients, you will need to generate 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 must make the most of the writing that you manage to produce. Following are some suggestions for making sure 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 have produced some worthwhile, interesting material in any of the formats above, don’t just send it out once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception. You ought to distribute that content as broadly as is possible. For each item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded onto my 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 company aware of it and could they explain it further if a client questions them about it?
- Can I transform it into a different type of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented once then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare it gets only a one time showing. If you want to get much more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I present it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation to people who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it electronically online or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog discussing topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
While these ideas may seem 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 essential to remember that it is much easier to add a small amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the benefits of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you need to create 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.