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 wallet share of your stable of clients, you’ll need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you must make the most of the material that you manage to produce. Here are some ideas to help you use two of the most commonly produced types of legal marketing content as best 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 forms mentioned, you don’t need to only send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception area. You should distribute that content as much as possible. For every item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded to my website?
- Have I sent 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?
- Are others in the firm aware of it and can they explain it further if a client questions them?
- Can I transform it into another style of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented once and then left to become stale. All of the time required to prepare it gets just one showing. To get far more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies may I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to people who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it via email or directly?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog to discuss questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
While some of these suggestions might seem like more work just when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is necessary to remember that it is far easier to add a tiny amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you create content you’ll feel more confident 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.