Whether the legal marketing strategy for your law company is based on 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, and without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you must make the best of the material that you can produce. Following are several ideas to help 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 produced some worthwhile, interesting material in any of the types mentioned, don’t just send it off once or print it and let it stagnate in your reception. Distribute that content as much as is possible. For every item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded onto my website?
- Have I sent it directly to people who have referred me, 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?
- Are others in my firm aware of it and can they explain it further if a client asks?
- Can I transform it into a different type of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually written with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented once then left to stagnate. The large amount of time required to prepare it results in only a one time showing. To get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else could I present it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation to people who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it via email or directly?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog discussing topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
Although a lot of these ideas might feel like additional 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’s necessary to consider that it’s much easier to use a small amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of all 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.