If the legal marketing strategy for your law firm 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 generate content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you should make the most of the material you manage to produce. Following are just a few suggestions to help you use two of the most reliably 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 produced some worthwhile, interesting material in any of the forms mentioned, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception. You ought to distribute that content as broadly as is possible. For each item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto my website?
- Have I emailed it directly 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 about it?
- Can I transform it into another style of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually written with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented once and then left to become stale. All of the time involved in preparing them results in only a one time showing. If you want to get more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies may I present it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation 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 to discuss questions that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
While a lot of these ideas might 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 is crucial to remember that it’s much easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of all 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 will 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.