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 a share of your stable of clients, you’ll need to create content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content requires hard work, and you should make the most of the writing that you can produce. Here 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 created some worthwhile, interesting material of any of the forms mentioned, don’t just send it out once or print it and let it sit in your reception area. Distribute that content as widely as is possible. For each piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it 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 further if a client asks about it?
- Can I turn it into another kind of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented once then left to become stale. All of that effort and time involved in preparing it results in just one showing. To get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else could I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation 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 during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While some 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 crucial to remember that it is far easier to use a tiny amount of time at the end to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the benefits of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you create content you will 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.