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 a solid growth of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content means hard work, and you should make the most of the writing you can produce. Here are just a few suggestions 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’ve created some quality, interesting material of any of the forms mentioned, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and let it sit in your office. You can distribute the content as broadly as possible. For every item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded to our website?
- Have I emailed it directly to referrers, associates and other professionals?
- Have I linked it with a post on Facebook and a tweet on Twitter?
- Has it been sent to media contacts?
- Are others in the company aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client asks about it?
- Can I transform it into another kind of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually written with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once then left to stagnate. All of that effort and time required to prepare them gets only a one time showing. To get more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies can I present it to?
- How could 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?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation to those who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it electronically online or directly?
- Can I 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?
Although these suggestions may feel like more work just 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 is important to remember that it’s much easier to add a small amount of time at the end to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the results of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you 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.