If the legal marketing strategy for your law company 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 generate content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you must make the best of the material that you manage to produce. Here are several 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’ve produced any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the formats above, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception area. You ought to distribute that content as broadly as is possible. For every item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded onto our website?
- Have I emailed it directly 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?
- Are others in the company 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 form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented only once and then left to stagnate. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare it results in only a one time showing. If you want to get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else could I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and 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?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it via email 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?
While a lot of these ideas may seem 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’s important to remember that it’s much easier to use a tiny amount of time at the end to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you create some content you will 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.