If the marketing strategy for your law firm 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’ll need to generate content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you need to make the best of the material you can produce. Here are just a few suggestions to help you use the two most popularly produced types of legal marketing content as best you can.
Law Firm Marketing – Written material (blogs, email alerts, brochures, guides, information sheets)
If you have written any worthwhile, interesting material of any of the formats mentioned, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception area. You can 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?
- Has it been loaded onto my website?
- Have I emailed it direct to referrers, 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?
- Are others in the firm aware of it and could they explain it further if a client has queries about it?
- Can I transform it into another style of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented only once and then left to become stale. The large amount of time involved in preparing them results in only a one time showing. To get far more benefit from 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 my website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation 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?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog discussing questions that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While some of these suggestions might feel 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 important to remember that it’s far easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the benefits of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover 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.