Whether the marketing strategy for your law company 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, and without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content means hard work, and you want to make the most of the writing that you can produce. Following are several ideas for making sure you use the two most commonly 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’ve created any worthwhile, interesting material of any of the formats above, don’t just send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your office. Distribute that content as broadly as possible. For each item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded onto 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?
- Is everyone in the firm aware of it and can they explain it further if a client questions them?
- Can I turn it into a different style of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually prepared with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once then left to stagnate. All of the time involved in preparing them gets only a one time presentation. To get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies can I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed 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?
- 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 discussing topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
Although some of these ideas might seem like additional 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’s necessary to remember that it is far easier to use a small amount of time now to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the results of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you create some content you’ll feel more positive 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.