If the marketing strategy for your law firm revolves around 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 create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content requires hard work, and you want to make the most of the material that you can produce. Following are some suggestions to help you use the two most reliably 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 produced some quality, interesting material of any of the formats mentioned, don’t just send it out once or print it and let it sit in your reception area. You ought to distribute the content as broadly as possible. For every piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded onto my website?
- Have I emailed it direct to people who have referred me, 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?
- Are others in my firm aware of it and could they explain it further if a client has queries about it?
- Can I turn it into another kind of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented once and then left to become stale. The large amount of time required to prepare it results in just one showing. If you want to get more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies can I show it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy to those who were unable to 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 to discuss topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
While some of these ideas 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 much easier to use a small amount of time now to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the benefits of all the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see 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.