If the marketing strategy for your law firm revolves around online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of your stable of clients, you’ll need to generate content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content requires hard work, and you must make the most of the material you can produce. Following are some quick suggestions to help you use the two most popularly 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 written any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the formats above, don’t just send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception. You ought to distribute that content as broadly as is possible. For every piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded to my website?
- Have I sent it direct to people who have referred me, 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 my firm aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client questions them?
- Can I turn 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 tend to be presented only once and then left to stagnate. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing it gets just one showing. If you want to get more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies may I show it to?
- How can 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 the presentation in hard copy to those who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Can 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 to discuss questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While a lot of these suggestions may feel like more work just when you’ve possibly created a dent in your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is important to consider that it is far easier to add a small amount of time now to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the benefits of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you create some content you will feel more confident about how effective that content 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.