If 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’ll need to create content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you should make the best of the material that you can produce. Here are some quick 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 have produced any worthwhile, interesting material of any of the formats mentioned, don’t just send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception area. You can distribute that content as widely as possible. For each piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded to my website?
- Have I sent 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?
- Are others in my company aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client asks?
- Can I turn it into another type of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once and then left to become stale. The large amount of time involved in preparing them results in just one showing. If you want to get much more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies could I present it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to those who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Could 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 to discuss topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While these ideas might seem like additional work at a time when you’ve possibly damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s important to remember that it’s much easier to add a small amount of time now to really maximise on what 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 discover 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.