Whether the legal marketing strategy for your law firm depends on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of your stable of clients, you will need to generate content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you need to make the most of the writing you manage to produce. Following are some suggestions to help you use the two most reliably 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 produced any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the formats above, don’t just send it out once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception area. You should distribute the content as widely as is possible. For each piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded onto our website?
- Have I emailed 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?
- Are others in my firm aware of it and could they explain it further if a client has queries about it?
- Can I turn it into a different type of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually written with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once and then left to become stale. The large amount of time involved in preparing them gets just one presentation. To get much 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 discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy to those who were unable to 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 to discuss topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
Although a lot of these suggestions may seem like more work at a time when you’ve probably created a dent in your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s crucial to consider that it is much easier to add a tiny 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 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 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.