If the marketing strategy for your law firm depends on 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 create content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you must make the best of the writing 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 have produced any worthwhile, interesting material of any of the formats above, you don’t need to just send it out once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception area. You can distribute the content as broadly as is possible. For every piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it 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 the firm aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client questions them about it?
- Can I transform it into a different style of content and distribute in a different form?
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 then left to stagnate. All of the effort and time required to prepare it results in just one showing. If you want to get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else may I present it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to people who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Could 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 topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
Although a lot of these ideas may seem like more work just when you’ve probably 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 small amount of time now to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you create content you will feel more positive 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.