If the marketing strategy for your law company revolves around 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 the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you want to make the most of the material that you manage to produce. Following are just a few ideas to help you use the two most popularly 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 written some worthwhile, interesting material in any of the forms above, don’t just send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your office. You can distribute the content as broadly 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 directly 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 firm aware of it and can they explain it further if a client asks?
- Can I transform it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented once then left to stagnate. All of the effort and time required to prepare them results in just one presentation. If you want to get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else may I present it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to 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 electronically online or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog discussing questions that arose from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While these ideas might feel like additional 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 crucial to remember that it is much easier to add a tiny amount of time now to really impact 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 and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you 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.