Whether the 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 generate content.
Content is an essential dynamic of legal marketing, and 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 best of the material you can produce. Following are some suggestions for making sure 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 in any of the formats mentioned, you don’t need to just send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception area. You ought to distribute the content as widely as is possible. For each item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded onto my website?
- Have I sent it directly 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 my firm aware of it and can they explain it further if a client asks about it?
- Can I turn it into a different type of content and distribute in a different forum?
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 the time involved in preparing it gets just one showing. If you want to get much more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else could I show it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I 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 electronically online or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog discussing topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While these ideas might feel 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 consider that it’s far easier to use a tiny amount of time now 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 all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you need to create content you will 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.