Whether the marketing strategy for your law firm is based on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of your stable of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content requires hard work, and you must make the most of the writing that you can produce. Here are some suggestions to help you use two of the most reliably 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 created any worthwhile, interesting material of any of the formats above, don’t only send it off once or print it and let it sit in your reception. Distribute that content as much as possible. For every piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded onto 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?
- Are others in my 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 kind of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented only once and then left to stagnate. All of the time involved in preparing it gets just one presentation. If you want to get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can 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 a hard copy of the presentation to people 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 topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
While some of these suggestions may seem 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 essential to remember that it is far easier to add a small amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression 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 see that the next time you need to create content you’ll feel more positive 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.