Whether the marketing strategy for your law firm depends 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 an essential part of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you want to make the best of the material you can produce. Here are several suggestions for making sure you use two of the 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 created any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the formats mentioned, you don’t need to just send it out once or print it and let it stagnate in your reception area. You should distribute the content as broadly as possible. For every piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded onto my 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 my firm aware of it and could they explain it further if a client has queries about it?
- Can I turn it into a different style of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented only once and then left to become stale. All of the effort and time required to prepare them results in only a one time showing. If you want to get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else could I show it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of 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 were unable to attend the seminar?
- Can I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it via email or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog to discuss topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While a lot of these suggestions may feel like more 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 is necessary to remember that it is far easier to use a small amount of time now 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 results of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you need to create some content you’ll 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.