If the legal marketing strategy for your law firm revolves around online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of your stable of clients, you’ll need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content means hard work, and you want to make the most of the material you can produce. Here are some suggestions to help you use the two 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 created any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the forms above, don’t only send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception area. You ought to distribute the content as broadly as possible. For every piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded to my 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 the company aware of it and could 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 forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually prepared with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented once then left to stagnate. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing them results in just one showing. If you want to get more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies could I present it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation to people 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 during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
Although some of these ideas may 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 important to remember that it’s far easier to add a small amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the benefits of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you need to create content you’ll feel more positive 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.