If the marketing strategy for your law company depends 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 generate content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you want to make the best of the writing that you manage to produce. Following are some ideas to help you use the two 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’ve created any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the forms mentioned, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and let it sit in your reception area. Distribute the content as much as is possible. For every item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded onto our website?
- Have I sent it directly 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?
- Is everyone in the company aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client asks about it?
- Can I transform it into another type 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. Therefore they tend to be presented only once then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare them results in just one showing. If you want to get much more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I show it to?
- How can 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 were unable to 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 to discuss topics 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 seem like more work just 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 remember that it’s far easier to use a small amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you need to create some 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.