Whether the legal marketing strategy for your law firm revolves around online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing wallet share of a solid growth of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you should make the most of the material you manage to produce. Following are several suggestions to help you use two of the most reliably 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 written some worthwhile, interesting material of any of the forms mentioned, don’t just send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your office. You ought to distribute the content as widely as is possible. For each item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded to my website?
- Have I sent 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 in detail if a client asks?
- Can I turn it into a different type of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented only once then left to stagnate. All of the time involved in preparing them gets only a one time presentation. To get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies could I present it to?
- How could 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?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation to those who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Can 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 topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
While a lot of these ideas might feel like more work at a time when you’ve possibly damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s necessary to consider that it’s far easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole 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 need to 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.