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 a share of your stable of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you should make the best of the writing you can produce. Following are several ideas for making sure you use the two 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 created any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the types mentioned, you don’t need to only send it off once or print it and let it sit in your reception area. You ought to distribute that content as widely as is possible. For every piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded onto 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?
- Is everyone in the firm aware of it and can they explain it further if a client questions them about it?
- Can I turn it into a different style of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented only once and then left to stagnate. All of that effort and time required to prepare them results in only a one time presentation. To get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies 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 offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation to those 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 discussing questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While some of these ideas may seem like additional work just when you’ve probably created a dent in your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s essential to remember that it is much easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise 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 will 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.