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 wallet share of your stable of clients, you’ll need to create content.
Content is an essential dynamic of legal marketing, without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content requires hard work, and you need to make the most of the material you manage to produce. Following are several suggestions to help you use the two 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’ve created any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the formats mentioned, don’t just send it out once or print it and let it sit in your reception area. You can distribute the content as broadly as possible. For every item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded to our website?
- Have I sent 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?
- Is everyone in the company aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client asks about it?
- Can I turn it into another type of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written 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. All of the effort and time required to prepare them gets just one showing. If you want to get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I present it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation to people who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Can 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 topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
Although some of these ideas may feel like more work at a time when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s crucial to remember that it’s much easier to add a tiny amount of time now to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover 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.