Whether 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 a 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 might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you should make the best of the material that you can produce. Following are some suggestions for making sure you use the two 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 worthwhile, interesting material of any of the types above, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and let it stagnate in your office. Distribute that content as widely as is possible. For each piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded onto our website?
- Have I sent it direct to referrers, 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?
- Is everyone in my firm aware of it and can they explain it further if a client has queries about it?
- Can I transform it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented only once and then left to stagnate. All of that effort and time involved in preparing them gets just one showing. To get much more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I show it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy 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?
- Can I write an article or blog discussing questions that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While a lot of these suggestions may seem like additional work at a time when you’ve probably created a dent in your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s crucial to remember that it’s far easier to add a tiny 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.
Maximise the results of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you need to create some 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.