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 create content.
Content is the lifeblood 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 should make the best of the material you manage to produce. Following are some suggestions for making sure 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’ve written any worthwhile, interesting material of any of the formats mentioned, you don’t need to only send it out once or print it and let it sit in your office. Distribute the content as broadly as is possible. For each piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded to our website?
- Have I sent it directly 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 firm aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client questions them?
- Can I transform it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented once then left to stagnate. All of that effort and time involved in preparing it results in just one showing. To get more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else can I show it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy 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?
- Can I write an article or blog discussing questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
Although these suggestions might seem like additional work at a time 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 remember that it is far easier to add a tiny amount of time now to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the results of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you create some content you will 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.