If the marketing strategy for your law company 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 an essential part of legal marketing, without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you must make the most of the writing you manage to 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 have created any quality, interesting material of any of the forms mentioned, you don’t need to just send it out once or print it and let it stagnate in your reception area. You ought to distribute the content as much as is possible. For every piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded onto my website?
- Have I sent it direct 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?
- Are others in my company aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client asks about it?
- Can I turn it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented only once and then left to stagnate. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing them gets only a one time showing. If you want to get more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else can I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation to those who couldn’t 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 to discuss topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
Although some of these ideas may seem 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 crucial to consider that it is far easier to add a tiny amount of time now to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce 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 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.