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 wallet share of your stable of clients, you will need to generate content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you should make the best of the material you manage to produce. Following are some quick suggestions for making sure you use the two 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 have produced some quality, interesting material of any of the formats above, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and let it stagnate in your office. You can distribute the content as widely as is possible. For each piece 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 emailed it direct 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 can they explain it further if a client asks about it?
- Can I turn it into a different type of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented once then left to become stale. All of the effort and time involved in preparing them results in just one showing. To get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else may I show it to?
- How could I let the most 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 couldn’t 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 topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While these ideas may seem like more 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 crucial to remember that it’s far easier to add a tiny amount of time now to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the benefits of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you 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.