If the 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 your stable of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, 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 best of the material that you can produce. Following are several ideas to help 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 only send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your office. You ought to distribute the content as broadly 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 my website?
- Have I sent it directly 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 company aware of it and could they explain it further if a client has queries about it?
- Can I transform it into another style of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once and then left to become stale. All of the effort and time required to prepare them results in just one presentation. If you want to get much more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies may I show it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my 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?
- 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 questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
While a lot of these ideas may feel 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 consider that it’s much easier to use a tiny amount of time now to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the benefits of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you create content you will 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.