If the marketing strategy for your law firm 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 the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you want to make the most of the material you manage to produce. Here are some quick ideas to help you use two of the 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’ve created any worthwhile, interesting material of any of the formats mentioned, don’t just send it off once or print it and let it stagnate in your office. You should distribute that content as broadly as possible. For each piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded onto 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?
- Is everyone in the company aware of it and can they explain it further if a client asks?
- Can I turn it into another type of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented once then left to become stale. The large amount of time involved in preparing it results in only a one time showing. To get 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 offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to 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 discussing topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While these suggestions might seem like more work just 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 is necessary to consider that it is much easier to add 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 benefits of all the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover 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.