Whether the 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 your stable of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content requires hard work, and you should make the best of the writing you can produce. Here are some quick suggestions for making sure you use the two most reliably 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 produced some quality, interesting material of any of the types above, don’t just send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your office. You ought to distribute that content as much as is possible. For each item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded to our 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?
- Is everyone in my firm aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client asks?
- Can I turn it into another style of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually prepared with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented once then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare them gets just one presentation. If you want to get much more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else could I present it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to people who were unable to 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 from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
Although a lot of these ideas may seem 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 important to remember that it’s far easier to use a tiny amount of time now to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the benefits of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you need to create some 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.