If the marketing strategy for your law firm depends on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing wallet share of your stable of clients, you’ll need to generate content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you must make the most of the writing that you manage to produce. Following are just a few ideas for making sure you use the two most reliably 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 created any quality, interesting material of any of the formats above, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and let it sit in your reception area. You should distribute the content as broadly as possible. For each item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded to my website?
- Have I emailed it direct 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?
- Are others in my company aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client asks about it?
- Can I turn it into a different style of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once and then left to stagnate. The large amount of time required to prepare it gets just one presentation. If you want to get much more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I show it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy 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 topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While a lot of these ideas may feel like more work at a time when you’ve possibly damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s important to remember that it is far easier to use a small amount of time now to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of all 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 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.