If the 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 a solid growth of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content means hard work, and you need to make the most of the material you can produce. Following are some quick 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’ve written any worthwhile, interesting material of any of the types mentioned, you don’t need to just send it out once or print it and let it sit in your reception. You can distribute the content as much as possible. For every item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded onto our website?
- Have I sent it directly to people who have referred me, associates and other professionals?
- Have I linked to 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 could they explain it further if a client asks about it?
- Can I transform it into a different style of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually written with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented only once then left to become stale. All of that time involved in preparing them results in only a one time presentation. To get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else may 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 people who couldn’t 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 questions that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
Although a lot of these suggestions may feel like additional work just when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s essential to consider that it’s much easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really maximise on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you need to create content you’ll 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.