If the marketing strategy for your law firm is based on 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 create content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you want to make the most of the writing you can produce. Following are just a few suggestions for making sure you use the two most reliably 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 written some worthwhile, interesting material in any of the types mentioned, don’t just send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception area. Distribute that content as broadly as is possible. For every 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 emailed it direct to people who have referred me, associates and other professionals?
- Have I linked to 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 can they explain it further if a client asks about it?
- Can I turn it into another kind of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally prepared with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented only once then left to become stale. All of that time involved in preparing it results in just one showing. If you want to get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else could I present it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation to people who couldn’t 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 from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
Although a lot of these suggestions might feel like more work just when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s crucial to consider that it’s much easier to add a tiny amount of time now to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the benefits of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you need to create some content you will 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.