If 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 a share of a solid growth of clients, you’ll need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, 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 most of the writing that you can produce. Following are several suggestions to help you use two of the 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 have written any worthwhile, interesting material of any of the formats above, don’t just send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception. You ought to distribute that content as widely as is possible. For each item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded onto my website?
- Have I emailed it direct 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 in detail if a client questions them?
- Can I turn it into another type of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented only once and then left to stagnate. All of the effort and time required to prepare them gets only a one time showing. To get much more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies can I present it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy to those who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Can I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it electronically online or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog discussing topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
Although these ideas might feel like additional 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 crucial to consider that it’s far easier to use a small amount of time at the end 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 the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you need to create content you’ll 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.