Whether the marketing strategy for your law firm revolves around 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 have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you need to make the most of the material that you can produce. Following are some quick suggestions for making sure you use the two most commonly 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 quality, interesting material in any of the formats mentioned, don’t only send it out once or print it and let it sit in your office. Distribute that content as widely as possible. For each piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded to 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 company aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client questions them about it?
- Can I transform it into another type of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually prepared with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented only once and then left to stagnate. The large amount of time required to prepare it results in only a one time presentation. If you want to get much more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else could I show 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 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?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog to discuss questions that arose from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
Although a lot of these suggestions may feel like additional work just 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’s essential to consider that it’s much easier to add a small amount of time at the end to really maximise on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the results 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’ll feel more confident 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.