If the marketing strategy for your law company revolves around 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, without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you should make the best of the writing that you can produce. Following are several suggestions to help 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 produced some quality, interesting material in any of the formats mentioned, don’t just send it out once or print it and let it stagnate in your reception. You should distribute the content as widely as possible. For every piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded to my website?
- Have I sent it directly to people who have referred me, 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?
- Are others in my company aware of it and could 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 written with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented once then left to stagnate. All of that time required to prepare them results in only a one time presentation. If you want to get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I show it to?
- How can I let the most 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 a hard copy of the presentation to those 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 followed up with additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
While these suggestions may feel like more work just when you’ve possibly created a dent in your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s essential to remember that it is much easier to add a small amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you create 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.