Whether 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 wallet share of your stable of clients, you’ll need to create content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you need to make the most of the material that you can produce. Following are just a few ideas 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’ve created any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the formats mentioned, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception. You can distribute that content as broadly as possible. For every piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded to my 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?
- Is everyone in the company aware of it and could they explain it further if a client questions them about it?
- Can I turn it into another type of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented once and then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing it gets just one presentation. If you want to get much more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else can I present it to?
- How could 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 people who were unable to 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 from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While some of 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 is essential to remember that it is much 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 benefits of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you create some 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.