Whether the legal marketing strategy for your law firm is based on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing wallet share of your stable of clients, you’ll need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content requires hard work, and you need to make the best of the writing that you can produce. Following are just a few 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 produced any quality, interesting material of any of the types mentioned, don’t only send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your office. Distribute that content as much as is possible. For every piece 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 direct 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?
- Is everyone in my company aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client questions them about it?
- Can I transform it into another type of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually prepared with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented once then left to stagnate. All of that effort and time involved in preparing it gets just one presentation. To get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else may I show it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy to those who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it via email or directly?
- Is it viable to 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?
While some of these ideas may feel 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 is necessary to consider that it’s much easier to add a small amount of time now to really maximise on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase 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 content you will 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.