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 a share of a solid growth of clients, you’ll need to create content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content requires hard work, and you should make the best of the material you manage to produce. Following are just a few suggestions to help you use the two 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 produced any quality, interesting material in any of the formats mentioned, don’t just send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception area. You can distribute that content as much as possible. For each piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto our website?
- Have I emailed it directly to people who have referred me, 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 the firm aware of it and can they explain it further if a client asks?
- Can I transform it into a different type of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented once then left to stagnate. The large amount of time involved in preparing it results in only a one time presentation. If you want to get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else may I present it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation to those 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 discussing questions that arose from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While a lot of these ideas might seem like more 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 important to remember that it’s much easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of all the time and effort 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 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.