If the legal marketing strategy for your law firm depends on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing wallet share of a solid growth of clients, you’ll need to generate content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you need to make the best of the writing you manage to produce. Here are some ideas for making sure you use the two most commonly 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 worthwhile, interesting material of any of the forms mentioned, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and let it sit in your reception area. Distribute the content as widely as possible. For every piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded onto our website?
- Have I emailed it directly 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 the company aware of it and could they explain it further if a client questions them about it?
- Can I turn it into another style of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually prepared with a particular 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 effort and time required to prepare it gets only a one time presentation. To get much more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else could I show it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy to people who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Can I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it electronically online or directly?
- Can I 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 attended the presentation?
While a lot of these ideas may seem like additional 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’s essential to consider that it’s far easier to use a tiny amount of time at the end to really maximise on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the results of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you 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.