If the legal 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’ll need to generate content.
Content is an essential dynamic of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you want to make the best of the writing that you can produce. Following are some suggestions to help you use the two most commonly 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 worthwhile, interesting material of any of the types mentioned, don’t just send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception area. You ought to distribute the content as much 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 emailed 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?
- Is everyone in my firm aware of it and could they explain it further if a client asks about it?
- Can I turn it into a different type of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually prepared with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented once then left to become stale. All of the time involved in preparing them results in only a one time showing. If you want to get much more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies can I present it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation to people who couldn’t 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 topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
While some of these suggestions may seem like more work just when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s necessary to consider that it is far easier to add a small amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover 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.