Whether 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 bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you need to make the best of the material you can produce. Following are some ideas to help you use the two most popularly 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 produced some worthwhile, 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 stagnate in your reception area. You can distribute the content as much as possible. For every piece 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 emailed it direct 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 in detail if a client has queries about it?
- Can I turn it into another kind of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented only once then left to stagnate. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare them results in only a one time showing. To get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I show it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I 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 via email or directly?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog to discuss topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While a lot of these suggestions may seem like more work at a time 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 crucial to consider that it is much easier to add a tiny 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 benefits of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you create some 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.