If the marketing strategy for your law firm 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 will need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you need to make the best of the writing you can produce. Following are several suggestions for making sure you use the two most popularly 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 produced any worthwhile, interesting material of any of the types mentioned, you don’t need to only send it off once or print it and let it stagnate in your office. You should distribute that content as widely as possible. For every piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded onto my website?
- Have I emailed it direct to people who have referred me, 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 my company aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client questions them 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 prepared with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented only once and then left to become stale. All of that time involved in preparing them results in only a one time presentation. If you want to get more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies could I show it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to people who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it electronically online or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog discussing questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
Although some of these ideas might seem like more 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 is necessary to remember that it is much easier to use a tiny amount of time now to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you need to create content you’ll feel more confident 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.