Whether the legal marketing strategy for your law company is based on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of your stable of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you must make the most of the material that you can produce. Following are some suggestions for making sure 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 some quality, interesting material of any of the forms mentioned, don’t only send it off once or print it and let it stagnate in your office. You should distribute the content as broadly as possible. For each piece of writing 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 direct 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 my firm aware of it and could they explain it further if a client asks?
- Can I turn it into a different style of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally prepared with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented only once and then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare them gets only a one time showing. If you want to get much more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else could I show it to?
- How can 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 people who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Can 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 during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
Although these suggestions might seem like more work just when you’ve possibly damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is essential to remember that it’s much easier to add a tiny amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the benefits of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you need to create content you will feel more positive about how effective the results 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.