If the marketing strategy for your law company depends 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 the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content means hard work, and you should make the most of the writing you manage to produce. Here are just a few ideas to help you use the two 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 written some quality, interesting material in any of the types above, you don’t need to only send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception. Distribute the content as much as is possible. For every piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded to our website?
- Have I sent it direct 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?
- Is everyone in my firm aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client questions them about it?
- Can I transform it into a different type of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented only once and then left to become stale. All of the effort and time involved in preparing it gets only a one time presentation. To get much more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else could I present it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I 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 electronically online or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog to discuss topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
Although some of these suggestions might seem like more work at a time when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s necessary to consider that it is much 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.
Maximise the results of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you create some content you’ll 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.