If the marketing strategy for your law company is based 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 may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you must make the most of the material that you can produce. Following are some suggestions for making sure you use two of the 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 written any worthwhile, interesting material of any of the formats mentioned, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception area. You can distribute the content as broadly as possible. For every piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded to my website?
- Have I sent it direct to referrers, 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 could they explain it in detail if a client asks about it?
- Can I turn it into a different type of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally prepared with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented once and then left to stagnate. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing them results in just one presentation. If you want to get much more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else 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 suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation to people who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Can 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 these suggestions 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 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 completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you need to create some content you will 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.