If the legal marketing strategy for your law company is based on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing wallet share of your stable of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you must make the most of the material that you can produce. Here 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 have written some worthwhile, interesting material in any of the formats above, you don’t need to only send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your office. You can distribute the content as widely as is possible. For each item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto our website?
- Have I sent it direct to people who have referred me, 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 firm aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client asks?
- Can I transform it into another type of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once and then left to stagnate. All of the effort and time involved in preparing it results in just one presentation. If you want to get much more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I show it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I 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 to discuss topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
Although some of these ideas might seem 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’s essential to consider that it’s much easier to add a small amount of time at the end to really maximise 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 see that the next time you need to create some content you’ll feel more confident 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.