If the marketing strategy for your law company revolves around online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing wallet 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 bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content requires hard work, and you should make the most of the material that you can produce. Following are several suggestions to help you use the two most commonly 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 created some quality, interesting material in any of the forms above, don’t only send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your office. You can distribute that content as widely as possible. For every item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded onto our website?
- Have I emailed 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 firm aware of it and can they explain it further if a client has queries about it?
- Can I transform it into another kind of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing it gets just one showing. If you want to get 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 my website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to 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 electronically online or directly?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog to discuss questions that arose from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While some of these suggestions may 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 important to remember that it’s much easier to use a tiny amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression 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’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.