If the legal marketing strategy for your law firm revolves around 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 create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you want to make the best of the writing that you manage to produce. Here are several ideas 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 have produced any quality, interesting material of any of the formats above, don’t just send it off once or print it and let it sit in your reception. You ought to distribute the content as widely as possible. For each item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto my website?
- Have I emailed it direct to referrers, associates and other professionals?
- Have I linked 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 in detail if a client asks?
- Can I turn it into another kind of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually written with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented only once and then left to stagnate. The large amount of time required to prepare them results in only a one time showing. To get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies may I present it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to those 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 discussing questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
While these ideas may seem like additional work just 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 small amount of time now to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the benefits of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you need to create content you’ll feel more confident 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.