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 a share of your stable of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content requires hard work, and you must make the most of the writing that you manage to produce. Here are just a few ideas for making sure you use two of the most commonly 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 produced some quality, interesting material in any of the types mentioned, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your office. You can distribute the content as widely as possible. For every piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded to my website?
- Have I emailed it directly 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?
- Are others in my firm aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client questions them about it?
- Can I turn it into a different style of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a specific reception 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 it gets just one presentation. To get much more benefit from 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 my website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation to those who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Can 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 discussing questions that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
Although 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 is crucial to remember that it’s far easier to use a tiny amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the benefits of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you need to create some 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.