If the legal marketing strategy for your law company 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 create content.
Content is an essential dynamic of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you want to make the best of the material that you manage to produce. Following are several suggestions to help you use the two most commonly produced types of legal marketing content as best you can.
Law Firm Marketing – Written material (blogs, email alerts, brochures, guides, information sheets)
If you have produced some worthwhile, interesting material in any of the formats mentioned, you don’t need to only send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your office. Distribute the content as widely as possible. For each piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded to our website?
- Have I sent it directly to people who have referred me, 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 firm aware of it and can they explain it further if a client questions them?
- Can I turn it into another type of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally prepared with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented once and then left to stagnate. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare it gets just one showing. To get much more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else could I present it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation to people who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it via email or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog discussing questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While these ideas may feel like more work just 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’s crucial to remember that it’s far easier to use a small amount of time now to really maximise on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the benefits of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you need to create content you will feel more positive 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.