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 your stable of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you should make the most of the writing that you manage to produce. Following are several suggestions for making sure you use the two most popularly 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 some worthwhile, interesting material in any of the types above, don’t only send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your office. You ought to distribute the content as much as is possible. For every item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto our website?
- Have I sent 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 my firm aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client questions them?
- Can I transform it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented only once and then left to become stale. The large amount of time involved in preparing it gets 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 our website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to those who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Can 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 discussing topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
Although some of these suggestions may feel like additional work just when you’ve possibly created a dent in your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s important to remember that it is far easier to add 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 you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover 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.