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 the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you want to make the best of the writing you can produce. Here are just a few suggestions to help you use two of the most reliably 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 created some quality, interesting material in any of the types mentioned, don’t just send it off once or print it and let it sit in your reception. Distribute that content as widely as is possible. For each piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded onto our website?
- Have I emailed it direct 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?
- Is everyone in my firm aware of it and could 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 format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once and then left to become stale. All of that effort and time involved in preparing it gets just one presentation. If you want to get far more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies could 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, and suggested that I 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?
- Can I write an article or blog to discuss questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While these suggestions might feel like additional 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’s necessary to consider that it is much easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the results of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you create 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.