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 wallet share of your stable of clients, you will need to generate content.
Content is an essential dynamic 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 want to make the best of the writing that you can produce. Here are some suggestions to help you use the two most reliably 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’ve created some worthwhile, interesting material of any of the types above, don’t just send it off once or print it and let it stagnate in your office. You should distribute that content as broadly as possible. For each 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 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 can they explain it in detail if a client asks?
- Can I turn it into another type 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. Therefore they tend to be presented once then left to stagnate. All of that time involved in preparing them gets just one showing. To get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else may I present it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation to those who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it via email 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 were at the presentation?
Although a lot of these suggestions might feel like additional work at a time when you’ve possibly created a dent in your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s important to remember that it’s far easier to add a tiny amount of time at the end to really maximise on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you need to create content you’ll 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.