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 a share of your stable of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you want to make the best of the writing you can produce. Following are some 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 have created any worthwhile, interesting material of any of the forms mentioned, you don’t need to only send it out once or print it and let it stagnate in your office. You can distribute the content as widely as possible. For every piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded to my website?
- Have I emailed it directly 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?
- Is everyone in the firm aware of it and could they explain it further if a client asks about it?
- Can I transform it into a different style of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented only once and then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing them results in just one presentation. If you want to get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies may I present it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy 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 from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
Although a lot of these suggestions may seem like more work at a time 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 important to remember that it’s far easier to add a small amount of time now to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the benefits of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you need to create some content you’ll feel more confident 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.