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 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 have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you want to make the best of the writing you can produce. Following are several suggestions for making sure you use the two most popularly 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 any worthwhile, interesting material of any of the formats mentioned, don’t just send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception area. You ought to distribute that content as much as is possible. For every piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded to our website?
- Have I sent 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 company aware of it and could they explain it further if a client questions them about it?
- Can I turn it into another kind of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented once then left to stagnate. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare it gets just one presentation. To get much more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I present it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our 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 electronically online or directly?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog to discuss questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While a lot of these ideas may seem like more 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 consider that it is much easier to use 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.
Maximise the benefits of all the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you need to create some content you will 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.