If the legal marketing strategy for your law firm revolves around online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of a solid growth of clients, you’ll need to generate content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you should make the most of the material that you can produce. Following are just a few 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 have created any worthwhile, interesting material of any of the forms above, don’t just send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your office. You should distribute that content as much 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 my website?
- Have I sent 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?
- Are others in the firm aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client asks about it?
- Can I transform it into another type 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 are often presented once then left to stagnate. All of the effort and time involved in preparing it gets only a one time presentation. To get much 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 mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation to people who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it via email or directly?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog to discuss topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While some of these suggestions might feel 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 much easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the results 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 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.