If the marketing strategy for your law company revolves around online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing wallet share of your stable of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you should make the most of the writing you can produce. Here are just a few suggestions to help you use the two most reliably 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 produced any quality, interesting material in any of the forms mentioned, don’t just send it out once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception area. Distribute the content as broadly as possible. For every item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto my website?
- Have I emailed it directly to people who have referred me, 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 asks about it?
- Can I turn it into another type of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually written with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented once and then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing it results in only a one time presentation. If you want to get far more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies may I show it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation 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?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog discussing questions that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While these suggestions might seem like additional work just when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s crucial to consider that it is much easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the results 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.