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 a solid growth of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is an essential dynamic of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you should make the most of the material that you can produce. Following are some 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 have produced some quality, interesting material of any of the formats mentioned, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and let it stagnate in your reception. You should distribute the content as widely as is possible. For each piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded onto our website?
- Have I emailed 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 can they explain it in detail if a client questions them about it?
- Can I transform it into a different type of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally prepared with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented once then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare it results in just one showing. If you want to get more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else can I show it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy 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 that were at the presentation?
Although a lot of these ideas might seem like more work just when you’ve probably created a dent in your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s necessary to consider that it is far easier to add a small amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced 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 need to create some content you will feel more positive 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.