Whether 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, and without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you want to make the best of the writing that you can produce. Following are several 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 written some quality, interesting material of any of the types mentioned, you don’t need to just send it out once or print it and let it sit in your reception. You should distribute the content as broadly as possible. For each item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded to my website?
- Have I emailed it directly 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?
- Are others in my firm aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client questions them about it?
- Can I turn it into another type of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally prepared with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented only once then left to stagnate. The large amount of time required to prepare it gets just one showing. If you want to get much more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies 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, and suggested that I 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 discussing questions that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
While some of these ideas may seem like more work at a time 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 add a small amount of time now to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you create some content you’ll 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.