Whether the legal marketing strategy for your law firm depends on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of a solid growth of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, 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 best of the material that you manage to produce. Here are just a few ideas to help 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 created some quality, interesting material in any of the forms mentioned, don’t only send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception area. You can distribute that content as widely as is possible. For every 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 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?
- 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 kind of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented only once then left to stagnate. All of the time involved in preparing it results in just one presentation. If you want to get much more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies may I present 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?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation to those who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Can I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it via email 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 that were at the presentation?
Although a lot of these ideas may feel like more work at a time when you’ve possibly created a dent in your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is important to consider that it’s far easier to use a tiny amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you create content you will 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.