If the 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 dynamic of legal marketing, without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you should make the most of the material that you manage to produce. Here are some quick suggestions for making sure 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 created any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the forms mentioned, don’t just send it off once or print it and let it sit in your reception. You should distribute the content as broadly as is possible. For each piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded onto my website?
- Have I sent it directly to people who have referred me, 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?
- Are others in the company aware of it and can they explain it further if a client asks?
- Can I transform it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally prepared with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented once then left to become stale. All of the time required to prepare them results in just one presentation. To get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else may I present it to?
- How could 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 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?
- Can I write an article or blog discussing topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
While some of these suggestions might feel like additional work just 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’s much easier to use a tiny amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the benefits of all the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you need to create content you’ll 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.