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 wallet share of your stable of clients, you will need to generate content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content means hard work, and you should make the best of the material that you manage to produce. Here are several suggestions for making sure you use the two most reliably 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 written some worthwhile, interesting material of any of the formats above, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and let it sit in your office. Distribute that content as widely as is possible. For each item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto our website?
- Have I emailed 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 firm aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client asks?
- Can I turn it into a different style of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented only once then left to become stale. All of the effort and time involved in preparing it results in just one showing. If you want to get much more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies can I present it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to people who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Could 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 to discuss questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
Although some of these ideas may 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 is essential to remember that it is far easier to use a small amount of time now to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of all the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you need to create content you will 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.