If the legal marketing strategy for your law firm revolves around online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of your stable of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is an essential dynamic of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you need to make the most of the writing you manage to produce. Following are just a few 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’ve produced any worthwhile, interesting material of any of the types mentioned, you don’t need to just send it out once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception. You can distribute the content as broadly as possible. For every item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- 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?
- Are others in the company aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client asks?
- Can I turn it into a different style of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually written with a specific reception 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 effort and time involved in preparing them results in only a one time presentation. To get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I show it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation to those who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Could 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 sent additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While these ideas may feel like more 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 is important to consider that it is much easier to add a tiny amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you create 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.