If the 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 the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content means hard work, and you need to make the most of the writing you can produce. Here are some 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 have produced some worthwhile, interesting material in any of the types above, don’t just send it out once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your office. You should distribute the content as widely as possible. For each item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it 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?
- Is everyone in my firm aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client asks?
- Can I turn it into another kind of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented only once and then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare it gets only a one time showing. To get more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies may I show it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy to people who couldn’t 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 to discuss questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
Although these suggestions may seem like additional work at a time 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 is necessary to consider that it is much easier to use a tiny amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you create content you’ll feel more confident 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.