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 a solid growth 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 bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content requires hard work, and you must make the best of the material you can produce. Here are several suggestions for making sure you use the two most popularly produced types of legal marketing content as best you can.
Law Firm Marketing – Written material (blogs, email alerts, brochures, guides, information sheets)
If you have produced any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the formats mentioned, you don’t need to only send it off once or print it and let it sit in your office. You ought to distribute that content as much as possible. For each item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded onto our website?
- Have I emailed it directly 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?
- Are others in my company aware of it and could they explain it further if a client questions them about it?
- Can I turn it into a different type of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented once then left to become stale. All of the time required to prepare them results in just one showing. To get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else may I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to those who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Could 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 from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
While a lot of these ideas may feel 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 is crucial to consider that it is much easier to use a small amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the benefits of all the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you need to create some 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.