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 create content.
Content is an essential dynamic of legal marketing, and without it you might just 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 writing that you manage to produce. Following are some 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 written 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 sit in your office. You ought to distribute the content as widely as possible. For every piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded to my website?
- Have I sent 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 firm aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client asks?
- Can I turn it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally prepared with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented once then left to become stale. All of that effort and time involved in preparing it results in just one presentation. To get far more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies could I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation to people who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Can 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 who attended the presentation?
Although some of these ideas may seem like more work at a time when you’ve probably created a dent in your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s essential to remember that it is much easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of 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 positive 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.