If the marketing strategy for your law company revolves around 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 create content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you must make the best of the writing you can produce. Here are some quick suggestions to help you use the two most reliably 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 worthwhile, interesting material in any of the forms mentioned, you don’t need to only send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception area. You can distribute the content as broadly as is possible. For each item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded to our website?
- Have I emailed it directly 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?
- Is everyone in my firm aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client asks about it?
- Can I transform it into another style of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented once and then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing them gets just one showing. To get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I show it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to 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 electronically online 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?
While these ideas may seem like more 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 important to consider that it is far easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the benefits of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find 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.