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 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 want to make the best of the material you can produce. Here are just a few suggestions to help you use the two most reliably 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 written some quality, interesting material in any of the types mentioned, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception area. You should distribute the content as broadly as possible. For every item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded to our website?
- Have I sent it directly 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 my company aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client questions them about it?
- Can I transform it into another kind of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a particular 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 just one presentation. To get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else may I show it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I 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 during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
While some of these ideas might seem 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 is necessary to consider that it is far easier to use a small amount of time now to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you create content you’ll feel more positive 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.