Whether the legal marketing strategy for your law firm depends on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of a solid growth of clients, you will need to generate content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and 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 suggestions to help 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’ve produced some quality, interesting material of any of the formats mentioned, don’t only send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your office. You ought to distribute the content as broadly as possible. For every piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto our website?
- Have I emailed it direct 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?
- Is everyone in the company aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client asks about it?
- Can I transform it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented only once and then left to stagnate. The large amount of time required to prepare it gets only a one time presentation. If you want to get far more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies could I present it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our 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?
- Can 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 from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
While a lot of these suggestions might seem like more 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 important to consider that it’s far easier to add a small amount of time at the end to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise 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 the results 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.