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 a solid growth of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is an essential dynamic of legal marketing, 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 material you manage to produce. Following are just a few 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 have written any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the formats above, don’t just send it out once or print it and let it stagnate in your reception area. Distribute the content as much as is possible. For each item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded to my 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?
- Is everyone in the company aware of it and can they explain it further if a client asks?
- Can I transform it into another kind of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented only once and then left to become stale. All of the time required to prepare them gets just one showing. If you want to get more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else could I show it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy 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 discussing questions 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 additional work at a time 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 far easier to use a tiny amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the results of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you need to create 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.