If the marketing strategy for your law firm depends on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of a solid growth of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content requires hard work, and you should make the best of the material that you manage to produce. Here are just a few 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 produced some quality, interesting material in any of the formats mentioned, don’t just send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception. You should distribute that content as much as possible. For every item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded to our 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 asks about it?
- Can I transform it into a different kind 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 only once and then left to stagnate. All of the effort and time required to prepare them gets only a one time presentation. If you want to get much more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies can 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 were unable to attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it electronically online or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog to discuss questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
Although some of these suggestions might feel like additional 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 essential to remember that it’s far easier to add a small amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you create content you’ll feel more positive 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.