If the 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 a solid growth of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you must make the most of the writing that you manage to produce. Following are some quick ideas 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 written any quality, interesting material of any of the formats mentioned, don’t only send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception area. You should distribute the content as widely as possible. For every item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded to my 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?
- Is everyone in my company aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client questions them?
- Can I turn it into another kind of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually written with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented once then left to become stale. The large amount of time involved in preparing it results in just one showing. To get much more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies may I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation 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?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog to discuss topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
Although a lot of these suggestions may seem like more work at a time when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is crucial to remember that it’s much easier to use a tiny 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 benefits of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you need to 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.