If the marketing strategy for your law firm is based on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing wallet share of your stable of clients, you will need to generate content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you should make the best of the writing you manage to produce. Here are just a few suggestions to help you use two of the most popularly 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 have produced some quality, interesting material of any of the forms above, you don’t need to just send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception. You should distribute that content as much as possible. For each piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto our website?
- Have I sent 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 the firm aware of it and can they explain it further if a client asks about it?
- Can I turn it into another kind of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented once then left to become stale. All of the time involved in preparing them results in just one presentation. If you want to get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else could I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation to people who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Can 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 topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
While some of these ideas 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 crucial to consider that it’s much easier to use a small amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you need to create content you’ll feel more confident 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.