Whether the marketing strategy for your law firm revolves around 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 generate content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you must make the most of the material that you can 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 produced any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the formats above, you don’t need to only send it off once or print it and let it stagnate in your office. You ought to distribute that content as widely as possible. For each item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded to our 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 asks?
- Can I turn it into another style of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented only once and then left to stagnate. All of that effort and time involved in preparing it gets just one presentation. If you want to get much more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I show it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy to those who were unable to 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 discussing questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While these ideas may seem like more work just when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is important to remember that it’s much easier to use a tiny amount of time now to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than to produce a completely 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 create content you’ll 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.