If the legal 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 a solid growth of clients, you will need to generate content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content means hard work, and you need to make the best of the writing that you manage to produce. Here are several suggestions for making sure you use the two most popularly 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’ve written any quality, interesting material of any of the formats mentioned, you don’t need to just send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your office. Distribute that content as broadly as possible. For every item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto my website?
- Have I sent it directly to referrers, 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 my company aware of it and could they explain it further if a client has queries about it?
- Can I transform it into another style of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented once then left to become stale. All of the effort and time involved in preparing it results in only a one time presentation. If you want to get much more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else could 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 suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation to people 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 discussing topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While some of these suggestions might 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 essential to consider that it is much easier to add a small 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 see that the next time you need to 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.