If the 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 a solid growth of clients, you’ll 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 is hard work, and you should make the best of the writing that you can produce. Following are some quick 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’ve written some quality, interesting material of any of the types above, don’t just send it out once or print it and let it sit in your office. Distribute the content as much as 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 our website?
- Have I sent it direct 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?
- Is everyone in my company aware of it and can they explain it further if a client asks?
- Can I turn it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally prepared with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented once then left to become stale. The large amount of time required to prepare them gets only a one time presentation. To get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else could I show it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I 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 electronically online or directly?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog discussing questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
While a lot of these suggestions may feel like additional work at a time when you’ve possibly created a dent in your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is crucial to remember that it is much easier to add a small amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the results of all the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find 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.