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 wallet share of your stable of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content means hard work, and you need to make the best of the writing you can produce. Here are just a few ideas to help you use the two most reliably 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 in any of the forms above, you don’t need to only send it out once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception area. Distribute the content as broadly as is possible. For each item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto my website?
- Have I sent it directly to people who have referred me, 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 questions them?
- Can I turn it into another type of content and distribute in a different format?
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 once then left to stagnate. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare it gets just one showing. If you want to get much more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies may I present it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to those who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Can I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it electronically online or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog discussing topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
Although a lot of these ideas may feel like additional work at a time when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is crucial to remember that it’s far easier to add a small 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 all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you 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.