If the marketing strategy for your law firm is based 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 an essential part of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you should make the most of the writing you can produce. Following are some ideas for making sure you use two of the most reliably 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 have produced some worthwhile, interesting material of any of the formats mentioned, don’t just send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception. You should distribute the content as widely as is possible. For each item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded to 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?
- Are others in my firm aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client questions them?
- Can I transform it into a different type of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented only once then left to stagnate. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing it results in only a one time presentation. If you want to get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else could I show it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed 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 people who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Can I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it via email or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog to discuss questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While a lot of these ideas might feel like additional 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’s necessary to remember that it is much easier to add a small amount of time now to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you create some content you’ll 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.