If the legal marketing strategy for your law company is based 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 part of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you need to make the most of the material you manage to produce. Following are some suggestions for making sure 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’ve written any quality, interesting material in any of the formats above, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and let it stagnate in your reception area. Distribute the content as widely as is possible. For every item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded to my website?
- Have I sent 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?
- Is everyone in the firm aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client has queries about it?
- Can I turn it into a different type of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually prepared 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 stagnate. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing them gets just one presentation. To get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else may I show it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to those who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it electronically online or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog to discuss topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
Although these suggestions might seem like more work at a time when you’ve possibly damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is important to remember that it is far easier to use a small amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the results of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find 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.