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’ll need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you need to make the most of the material that you can produce. Following are some ideas to help you use two of the most reliably produced types of legal marketing content as best you can.
Law Firm Marketing – Written material (blogs, email alerts, brochures, guides, information sheets)
If you’ve produced some worthwhile, interesting material of any of the types mentioned, don’t just send it off once or print it and let it stagnate in your office. You should distribute that content as much as possible. For every 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 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 the company aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client asks?
- Can I turn it into another kind of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented once then left to become stale. All of the effort and time required to prepare it gets only a one time presentation. To get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to people who were unable to 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 to discuss topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
Although these ideas might seem like more work at a time 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 important to consider that it’s much easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the benefits of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you create content you will feel more positive about how effective the results 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.