If the 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’ll need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you should make the best of the writing you can produce. Following are several suggestions to help you use two of the 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 any worthwhile, interesting material of any of the formats mentioned, you don’t need to only send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your office. Distribute the content as much as possible. For every piece 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 sent it directly to referrers, associates and other professionals?
- Have I linked 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 transform 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 only once and then left to stagnate. All of the effort and time required to prepare them results in only a one time presentation. If you want to get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies can 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, or offered to present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation 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?
- Is it viable to 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?
Although some of these ideas may feel like more work at a time when you’ve possibly created a dent in your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is important to remember that it’s much easier to use a tiny amount of time now to really impact on the impression 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 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.