If the legal marketing strategy for your law firm depends on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing wallet share of a solid growth of clients, you’ll need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content requires hard work, and you want to make the most of the writing that you manage to produce. Following are just a few suggestions for making sure you use two of the 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 created some quality, interesting material in any of the forms above, don’t just send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your office. You should distribute the content as broadly as possible. For every piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed 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 the company aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client asks about it?
- Can I turn it into another type of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written 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 required to prepare it results in only a one time showing. If you want to get more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies could I show it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to 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 electronically online or directly?
- Can I 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 some of these suggestions might seem like more 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 consider that it is much easier to use a small amount of time now to really maximise on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the benefits of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you create some 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.