If the legal marketing strategy for your law firm revolves around online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of your stable of clients, you will need to generate content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you should make the most of the writing you can produce. Following are several suggestions for making sure you use the two most popularly 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 written some quality, interesting material in any of the forms mentioned, you don’t need to just send it out once or print it and let it sit in your office. You can distribute that content as broadly as is possible. For each piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded onto our website?
- Have I emailed it directly to referrers, 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 the company aware of it and could they explain it further if a client questions them?
- Can I turn it into another style of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually written with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once then left to stagnate. All of that effort and time involved in preparing them gets just one presentation. If you want to get far more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies may I present it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation to those 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 during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
Although these suggestions may feel like additional work at a time when you’ve probably damaged 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 to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover 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.