Whether 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 the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content means hard work, and you should make the most of the writing that you manage to produce. Here are some suggestions 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 produced any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the forms mentioned, you don’t need to only send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception. You should distribute that content as much as possible. For each item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it 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 my firm aware of it and can they explain it further if a client questions them about it?
- Can I turn it into another style 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 once then left to become stale. All of the time involved in preparing it gets only a one time presentation. If you want to get more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies could I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to those who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Could 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 followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While a lot of these suggestions may 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 important to consider that it is much easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really maximise on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the benefits of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you create some 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.