If the legal 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 the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content requires hard work, and you should make the most of the material you can produce. Following are some suggestions to help you use two of the 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 have produced some quality, interesting material of any of the formats above, don’t just send it out once or print it and let it sit in your reception area. You should distribute the content as widely as is possible. For every item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded onto our website?
- Have I emailed it directly 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?
- Are others in the company aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client questions them about it?
- Can I transform it into another type of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented once and then left to become stale. All of the effort and time required to prepare it gets just one showing. To get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I present it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy to people 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 to discuss questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
While a lot of these suggestions may seem like more work just 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 consider that it is far easier to add a tiny amount of time at the end to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the results of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you 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.