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 a solid growth of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is an essential dynamic of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you want to make the most of the material you manage to produce. Following are just a few suggestions 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 produced some worthwhile, interesting material of any of the forms mentioned, don’t just send it off once or print it and let it stagnate in your office. You should distribute the content as widely as is possible. For every piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded to my website?
- Have I sent it direct 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 my firm aware of it and could they explain it further if a client asks about it?
- Can I turn it into another style of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a specific 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 involved in preparing them gets only a one time showing. If you want to get much more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else may 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, or 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 questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While some of these ideas may feel like more work just when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is essential to consider that it’s much easier to add a small amount of time at the end to really maximise on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the benefits of all the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you need to create some content you’ll 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.