If the legal marketing strategy for your law firm revolves around online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a 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 bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you need to make the best of the material you can produce. Following are just a few suggestions to help 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 produced any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the formats mentioned, you don’t need to only send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception area. You can 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 possible?
- Is it loaded to my 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?
- 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 kind of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally prepared with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once then left to stagnate. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing it gets just one showing. To get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies can I show it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation to people who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Can I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it via email 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 that attended the presentation?
While a lot of these suggestions may feel like additional work just when you’ve possibly 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 far easier to add a tiny amount of time now to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve 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 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.