If the legal marketing strategy for your law company is based on 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 bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you should make the most of the material you manage to produce. Following are some 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 produced some worthwhile, interesting material of any of the types above, don’t only send it off once or print it and let it sit in your reception. You ought to distribute that content as much as is possible. For each piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- 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 firm aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client asks?
- Can I turn it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented only once and then left to stagnate. The large amount of time required to prepare them results in just one presentation. If you want to get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies may I show it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my 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?
- Can 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 questions 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 suggestions might seem like additional 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 is important to remember that it’s much easier to add a small amount of time at the end to really maximise 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 discover 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.