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 wallet share of a solid growth of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content requires hard work, and you should make the best of the material you can produce. Following are some suggestions for making sure you use two of the most commonly 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 in any of the types above, don’t only send it off once or print it and let it sit in your office. Distribute that content as much as possible. For every item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto my website?
- Have I sent 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 the firm aware of it and can they explain it further if a client has queries about it?
- Can I transform it into another type of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a specific audience 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. If you want to get more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else may I show it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to 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 that attended the presentation?
While these suggestions may feel 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 is necessary to consider that it is far easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely 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 create some content you will feel more positive about how effective the results 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.