If the legal 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 the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you should make the most of the material that you manage to produce. Following are just a few ideas for making sure you use the two most reliably 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 any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the types above, don’t only send it out once or print it and let it stagnate in your reception. Distribute the content as much as is possible. For every item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded onto our website?
- Have I emailed it directly to people who have referred me, 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 company aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client questions them?
- Can I transform it into a different type of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented only once and then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing them results in only a one time presentation. If you want to get more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies can I present it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to those 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 during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
Although a lot 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 is necessary to remember that it is far easier to use a small amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see 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.