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 may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you must make the best of the material you manage to produce. Following are several suggestions for making sure you use the two most reliably 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 created some quality, interesting material in any of the types above, don’t just send it out once or print it and let it stagnate in your office. You should distribute the content as broadly as is possible. For each item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded to our website?
- Have I emailed it direct 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?
- Are others in my company aware of it and can they explain it further if a client has queries about it?
- Can I turn it into another style of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally prepared with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once then left to become stale. The large amount of time involved in preparing it gets just one presentation. If you want to get far more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies may I show it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our 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?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it electronically online or directly?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog to discuss questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
While these suggestions may seem like additional 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 remember that it’s much easier to use a small amount of time now to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the benefits of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you need to create content you’ll feel more confident 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.