Whether the legal marketing strategy for your law firm depends on 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 create 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 you manage to produce. Following are some quick ideas to help you use two of the 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’ve written some worthwhile, interesting material of any of the forms mentioned, you don’t need to only send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception. You ought to distribute the content as much as possible. For each item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- 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 the company aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client questions them about it?
- Can I transform it into a different style of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually prepared with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented once and then left to stagnate. The large amount of time involved in preparing it gets only a one time showing. To get much more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else may I present it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy to those 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 questions that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
Although some of these suggestions might feel like additional work at a time when you’ve probably created a dent in your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s important to consider that it is much easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce 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 find that the next time you create content you will feel more positive 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.