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 your stable of clients, you will need to generate content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you may 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 some suggestions to help you use two of the 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 written some quality, interesting material in any of the formats mentioned, don’t only send it out once or print it and let it sit in your reception area. Distribute the content as widely as possible. For each piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded onto my website?
- Have I emailed it direct to referrers, 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 my company aware of it and could they explain it further if a client questions them?
- Can I turn it into a different type of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented once and then left to stagnate. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing it results in only a one time presentation. To get much more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies may I show it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy to people who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it electronically online or directly?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog to discuss topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While some of these suggestions might feel like more work just 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 consider that it is much 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 completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the benefits of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you create some 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.