If the legal marketing strategy for your law company 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’ll need to create content.
Content is an essential dynamic of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you must make the most of the material you can produce. Following are some ideas to help 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’ve written some quality, interesting material of any of the forms above, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and let it sit in your reception area. Distribute the content as widely as possible. For each piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it 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 my firm aware of it and can they explain it further if a client questions them about it?
- Can I turn it into another style of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented once and then left to stagnate. The large amount of time involved in preparing them gets only a one time showing. If you want to get much more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies could I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation 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?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog to discuss questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While a lot of these suggestions may 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 is necessary to consider that it’s far easier to use a tiny amount of time at the end to really maximise on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve 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 will 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.