Whether the legal marketing strategy for your law firm 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, without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you need to make the best of the writing that you can produce. Here are just a few suggestions 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 created some worthwhile, interesting material in any of the types above, don’t only send it out once or print it and let it stagnate in your office. You can distribute the content as broadly as possible. For every piece 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 sent 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?
- Are others in my firm aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client asks?
- Can I turn it into another kind of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually written with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented only once then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare them gets only a one time showing. If you want to get far more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies can I present it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed 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?
- Can 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 to discuss questions that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While some of these ideas may feel like more work just when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s essential to consider that it’s far easier to add a tiny 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.
Maximise 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.