Whether the marketing strategy for your law company 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 generate content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content requires hard work, and you should make the best of the writing you can produce. Here are several ideas 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 have created some worthwhile, interesting material of any of the types mentioned, you don’t need to just send it out once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception. Distribute that content as widely as possible. For each item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded to our website?
- Have I emailed it direct 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 the firm aware of it and could they explain it further if a client questions them about it?
- Can I transform it into a different type of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually prepared with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once then left to become stale. All of that effort and time involved in preparing them results in 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 could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy to people who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Could 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 questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
Although these suggestions might feel like additional 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 is essential to consider that it is far easier to add a small amount of time at the end to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the results of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you need to create content you will 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.