Whether the marketing strategy for your law company depends 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 generate content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you need to make the best of the writing you can produce. Following are just a few suggestions to help you use the two most commonly 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 some worthwhile, interesting material of any of the forms above, don’t only send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception area. Distribute the content as much as possible. For each piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded onto our website?
- Have I sent 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?
- Is everyone in my firm aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client asks about it?
- Can I turn it into a different 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. As a result they tend to be presented only once then left to stagnate. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare them gets just one presentation. To get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else may I show it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation to people who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Can I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it via email or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog discussing questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
Although a lot of these ideas might feel like more work just when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s necessary to consider that it is much easier to use a tiny amount of time now 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 benefits of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you 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.