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 wallet share of your stable of clients, you’ll need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you must make the most of the writing that you manage to produce. Here are several ideas 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’ve written any quality, 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 sit in your office. You ought to distribute that content as much as is 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 to our website?
- Have I emailed it directly to people who have referred me, associates and other professionals?
- Have I linked to it with a post on Facebook and a tweet on Twitter?
- Has it been sent to media contacts?
- Are others in the firm aware of it and can they explain it further if a client questions them?
- Can I transform it into another type of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented once then left to become stale. All of that effort and time involved in preparing it gets only a one time presentation. To get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I show it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned 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 those who were unable to 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 discussing questions that arose from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While some of these ideas might feel like more work just 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 is necessary to remember that it is far easier to use a small amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the results of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you need to 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.