If the marketing strategy for your law firm is based on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of your stable of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you should make the most of the material that you manage to produce. Following are some quick suggestions for making sure you use the two most commonly 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 written any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the types above, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception. You should distribute the content as much as is possible. For each item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded to our website?
- Have I emailed it directly 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 can they explain it in detail if a client questions them about it?
- Can I turn it into another type of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually prepared with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented only once and then left to stagnate. All of the effort and time involved in preparing them gets only a one time presentation. If you want to get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies can I present it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation to those who were unable to 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 discussing questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
Although some of these ideas may feel like additional work just when you’ve possibly created a dent in your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s important to remember that it is much easier to use a small amount of time now to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the benefits of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you need to create some 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.