If the marketing strategy for your law company depends 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 dynamic of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you must make the best of the material you can produce. Here are several suggestions to help you use the two most popularly 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 written some worthwhile, interesting material of any of the types above, you don’t need to only send it off once or print it and let it sit in your reception area. You should distribute the content as much as is possible. For each piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded to our website?
- Have I emailed it directly to people who have referred me, 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 the firm aware of it and could they explain it further if a client has queries about it?
- Can I turn it into another type of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented only once then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing them results in just one presentation. To get much more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else can I show 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 were unable to attend the seminar?
- Could 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 topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
Although a lot of these ideas may seem like more work just when you’ve probably created a dent in your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s crucial to remember that it’s far easier to use a tiny amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you need to create content you’ll feel more confident 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.