If the marketing strategy for your law firm revolves around online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing wallet share of your stable of clients, you will need to generate content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you may 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 some suggestions for making sure you use the two most commonly 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’ve written any quality, interesting material of any of the formats mentioned, don’t just send it off once or print it and let it sit in your office. Distribute that content as much as is possible. For each piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded onto my website?
- Have I emailed it direct 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 my company aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client asks about it?
- Can I turn it into a different style of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented only once and then left to become stale. All of that effort and time required to prepare them gets just one showing. If you want to get more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies could I present it to?
- How can 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 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?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog discussing questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
Although some of these ideas might seem like additional work just when you’ve possibly damaged 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 use a small 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.
Improve the results of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you need to create content you’ll feel more confident 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.