If 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’ll need to create content.
Content is an essential dynamic of legal marketing, without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content means hard work, and you need to make the most of the material that you manage to produce. Following are some ideas for making sure you use two of the 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 have written any quality, interesting material of any of the formats above, don’t only send it off once or print it and let it stagnate in your reception. You ought to distribute the content as widely as is possible. For every item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded onto my website?
- Have I sent it direct to referrers, 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?
- Is everyone in my company aware of it and can they explain it further if a client asks?
- Can I transform it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented once and then left to become stale. The large amount of time required to prepare them gets only a one time showing. To get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else could I present it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or 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 via email or directly?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog discussing topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
Although a lot of these suggestions might feel like more work at a time 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 remember that it’s far easier to add a small amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the results of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you 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.