If the legal marketing strategy for your law company depends on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of a solid growth 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 means hard work, and you should make the most of the material that you can 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 produced any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the types above, don’t just send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your office. You ought to distribute that content as much as is possible. For each item 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 sent it directly 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 company aware of it and can they explain it further if a client questions them about it?
- Can I turn it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a particular audience 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 involved in preparing them gets just one presentation. To get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I present it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Can I 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 electronically online or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog discussing topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While a lot of these ideas might seem like more 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’s essential to consider that it’s far easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the results of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you create some content you will feel more positive about how effective the results 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.