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 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 bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you must make the best of the material that you can produce. Following are just a few ideas for making sure you use two of the most commonly 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 some quality, interesting material in any of the formats mentioned, don’t just send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception area. Distribute the content as widely as is possible. For each item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto my website?
- Have I sent it direct 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?
- Are others in my company aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client questions them about it?
- Can I turn it into a different kind 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 are often presented once then left to become stale. The large amount of time required to prepare it gets only a one time presentation. To get much more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else can I present it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to those who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Could 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 followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
While some of these suggestions might feel like additional 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’s necessary to consider that it is far easier to use a tiny amount of time now to really maximise on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase 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 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.