If the legal marketing strategy for your law firm depends 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 part of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you need to make the most of the writing you can produce. Following are some quick suggestions for making sure you use the two most popularly 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 of any of the forms above, don’t just send it out once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception area. You should distribute the content as widely as is possible. For every item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been 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?
- Are others in the firm aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client asks?
- Can I turn it into another style of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented once and then left to stagnate. All of that time involved in preparing them gets only a one time presentation. To get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else may I present it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation to people 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 to discuss topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While a lot 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’s crucial to consider that it’s far easier to add a small amount of time at the end to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the results of all the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you create some content you’ll feel more positive 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.