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 a share of your stable of clients, you will 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 material you can produce. Following are several suggestions to help you use the two most commonly 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 created any quality, interesting material of any of the formats above, don’t just send it off once or print it and let it stagnate in your reception. You can distribute the content as much as is possible. For each item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded to our website?
- Have I sent it directly 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?
- Are others in the firm aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client has queries about it?
- Can I transform it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once and then left to stagnate. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing them results in only a one time showing. To get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies can I show it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy 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 to discuss questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
Although some of these ideas might seem 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 is essential to remember that it’s far easier to use a tiny amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase 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 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.