Whether the legal marketing strategy for your law company depends 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 the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you should make the most of the writing you can produce. Here are several ideas for making sure 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 created some worthwhile, interesting material in any of the forms mentioned, don’t only send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception area. You can distribute the content as broadly as possible. For each piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded onto my website?
- Have I emailed 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 the firm aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client has queries about it?
- Can I transform it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally prepared 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. All of that time required to prepare them gets only a one time showing. If you want to get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I show it to?
- How could 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 a hard copy of the presentation to those who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Can I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it electronically online or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog discussing topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
While these suggestions may feel like more work at a time 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 remember that it’s much easier to add a tiny amount of time at the end to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you need to create some content you will 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.