If the marketing strategy for your law company 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 will need to generate content.
Content is an essential dynamic of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you should make the most of the material that you manage to produce. Following are some suggestions to help you use two of the most popularly 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 produced any quality, interesting material in any of the types above, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and let it sit in your reception area. You ought to distribute the content as much as possible. For every item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded to our 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?
- Are others in my firm aware of it and could they explain it further if a client has queries about it?
- Can I turn it into a different type of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually written with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented once and then left to become stale. All of that effort and time required to prepare them gets only a one time showing. If you want to get much more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else could I show it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy to people who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Could 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?
While some of these ideas might feel like more work at a time 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 is important to remember that it is far easier to use a tiny amount of time at the end to really maximise on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you create content you will feel more confident 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.