If the legal marketing strategy for your law company depends 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 generate content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you must make the best of the material that you manage to produce. Here are some suggestions for making sure you use two of the most popularly produced types of legal marketing content as best you can.
Law Firm Marketing – Written material (blogs, email alerts, brochures, guides, information sheets)
If you have created any quality, interesting material of any of the forms mentioned, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and let it stagnate in your reception area. You should distribute the content as much as possible. For each piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded onto my website?
- Have I sent 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 firm aware of it and can they explain it further if a client asks about it?
- Can I transform it into another 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 once then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare them gets only a one time showing. If you want to get far more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies can I show it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation to people who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it via email or directly?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog discussing questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
While a lot of these suggestions may feel like additional 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 important to consider that it is far easier to use a tiny amount of time at the end to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you need to create 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.