Whether 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 wallet share of your stable of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is an essential dynamic of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you must make the best of the writing you can produce. Here are just a few ideas for making sure you use the two 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 created any quality, interesting material in any of the formats mentioned, you don’t need to just send it out once or print it and let it stagnate in your reception area. You can distribute the content as much as is possible. For every piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded to our website?
- Have I emailed it directly to referrers, 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?
- Is everyone in my company aware of it and could they explain it further if a client asks about it?
- Can I transform it into another type of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented once and then left to stagnate. All of the effort and time involved in preparing them results in only a one time showing. If you want to get much more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else could I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and 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 electronically online or directly?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog discussing topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While a lot of these ideas might seem like more 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 consider that it is far easier to add a small amount of time at the end 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 all the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you 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.