If the legal marketing strategy for your law firm 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 an essential dynamic of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you want to make the best of the writing you can produce. Following are some quick suggestions for making sure you use the two 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 produced any worthwhile, interesting material of any of the types above, don’t just send it out once or print it and let it sit in your office. You can distribute that content as widely as is possible. For each item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded onto my website?
- Have I sent 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 company aware of it and can they explain it further if a client has queries about it?
- Can I turn it into a different style 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. Therefore they are often presented only once and then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare it gets only a one time presentation. To get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to those who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Can I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it electronically online or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog to discuss topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
Although some of these suggestions might feel 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 crucial to remember that it’s far easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve 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 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.