Whether the legal 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 generate content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you want to make the most of the material that you manage to produce. Here are just a few ideas for making sure you use the two most commonly 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 have written any quality, interesting material of any of the forms mentioned, don’t just send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your office. You should distribute that content as broadly as possible. For every item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded onto our website?
- Have I sent 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 firm aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client asks 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 once then left to stagnate. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare it gets only a one time presentation. To get more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies can I present it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy to people who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it via email or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog to discuss topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
Although these ideas might seem like additional work at a time when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is essential to remember that it’s much easier to add a small amount of time at the end to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce a whole 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 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.