If the marketing strategy for your law company 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 the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you want to make the most of the material you can produce. Following are just a few ideas to help 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 created any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the formats above, don’t only send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception area. You ought to distribute the content as broadly as is possible. For every piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- 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 it with a post on Facebook and a tweet on Twitter?
- Has it been sent to media contacts?
- Are others in my company aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client questions them about it?
- Can I transform it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually written with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented only once then left to stagnate. All of that effort and time required to prepare it gets just one showing. To get far 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 discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation to those who couldn’t 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 to discuss topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While a lot of these suggestions might 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 is crucial to consider that it’s far easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you need to create some content you’ll 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.