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, without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content means hard work, and you want to make the most of the material you can produce. Here are some suggestions to help you use the two most reliably produced types of legal marketing content as best you can.
Law Firm Marketing – Written material (blogs, email alerts, brochures, guides, information sheets)
If you’ve created any quality, interesting material in any of the forms mentioned, you don’t need to only send it out once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your office. Distribute the content as broadly as possible. For each item 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 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 can they explain it in detail if a client questions them?
- Can I turn it into another style of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented once and then left to become stale. All of the effort and time involved in preparing it results in only a one time presentation. If you want to get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies can I show it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to 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?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog to discuss questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
Although a lot of these suggestions might feel like additional 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 essential to consider that it’s far easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the results of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you create some content you’ll 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.