If the legal 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 will need to generate content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content means hard work, and you want to make the best of the material you manage to produce. Following are some quick suggestions 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’ve produced any quality, interesting material of any of the formats above, don’t only send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception. You can distribute that content as widely as possible. For every piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded onto our website?
- Have I sent it direct 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 my firm aware of it and can they explain it further if a client questions them about it?
- Can I turn it into another style of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once and then left to become stale. All of the time required to prepare them gets just one showing. To get far more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies can I present it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to people who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Could 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 discussing topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
Although a lot of these suggestions might feel like more work just when you’ve possibly damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s essential to consider that it is far easier to add a tiny amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise 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 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.