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 wallet share of your stable of clients, you will need to generate content.
Content is an essential dynamic of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you should make the best of the material you manage to produce. Following are several suggestions for making sure you use two of the 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 some worthwhile, interesting material of any of the forms mentioned, don’t just send it out once or print it and let it sit in your reception area. You ought to distribute that content as widely as is possible. For each piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded to my website?
- Have I sent it direct 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 company aware of it and could they explain it further if a client questions them?
- 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 reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once then left to stagnate. All of that time involved in preparing them results in just one showing. To get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else may I show it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I 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 via email 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 attended the presentation?
While these ideas might feel like additional work at a time when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s necessary to consider that it’s far easier to use 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.
Improve the results of all the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see 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.