If the legal 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 an essential dynamic of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you must make the most of the material that you can produce. Following are some suggestions for making sure you use the two most commonly 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 forms above, don’t only send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception. Distribute the content as broadly as is possible. For every item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded onto our website?
- Have I emailed it direct to referrers, 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 the firm aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client asks?
- Can I transform it into another type of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally prepared with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented once then left to stagnate. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare them results in only a one time showing. To get much more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies can I present it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I 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 via email or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog discussing topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
Although some of these suggestions might seem 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’s crucial to remember that it’s much easier to add a tiny amount of time at the end to really maximise on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you need to create content you will 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.