If the 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 a solid growth of clients, you’ll need to create content.
Content is an essential dynamic of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content requires hard work, and you must make the most of the material that you can produce. Following are several 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’ve written any quality, interesting material in any of the formats mentioned, don’t just send it off once or print it and let it sit in your office. Distribute the content as widely as possible. For every item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded to our website?
- Have I sent it directly 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 my firm aware of it and can they explain it further 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 prepared with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented once and then left to stagnate. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare it results in just one showing. To get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I present it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to 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 from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
Although some of these ideas might 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 consider that it’s far easier to use a tiny amount of time at the end to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the results of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you create some content you will 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.