If the marketing strategy for your law company 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 the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you should make the best of the material you can produce. Here are several ideas to help you use two of the most popularly 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 created some quality, interesting material of any of the forms mentioned, you don’t need to only send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception area. You ought to distribute that content as widely as is possible. For each piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded onto my website?
- Have I emailed 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?
- Is everyone in my company aware of it and could they explain it further if a client questions them?
- Can I turn it into a different type of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually written with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented once and then left to become stale. All of the effort and time required to prepare them results in just one showing. If you want to get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else could I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to people who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Could 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?
Although a lot of these suggestions might 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 crucial to remember that it’s far easier to use a small amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of all 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.