If the marketing strategy for your law firm 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 create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content requires hard work, and you must make the most of the material that you can produce. Here are some quick ideas to help 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 have created any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the types above, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and let it sit in your reception. You ought to distribute that content as much as is possible. For each piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto our website?
- Have I sent 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 firm aware of it and could they explain it further if a client questions them about it?
- Can I transform it into another type of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented only once and then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing it gets only a one time showing. To get far more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies could I present it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I 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 from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
Although these suggestions might feel like more work just 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’s necessary to consider that it’s far easier to add a small amount of time now to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see 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.