If the marketing strategy for your law company is based on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of your stable of clients, you will need to generate content.
Content is the lifeblood 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 want to make the most of the writing you can produce. Here are just a few ideas to help 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 written some worthwhile, interesting material in any of the formats above, don’t just send it out once or print it and let it sit in your office. You should distribute the content as broadly as is possible. For each item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded to our website?
- Have I emailed it direct to people who have referred me, 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 the firm aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client has queries about it?
- Can I turn it into a different type of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally prepared with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented once and then left to become stale. All of that effort and time required to prepare it results in only a one time presentation. If you want to get far more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies could 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, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy 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?
- 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 attended the presentation?
Although some of these suggestions may feel like additional work at a time when you’ve possibly damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is crucial to consider that it is far easier to add a small amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the results of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you create content you will feel more positive 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.