Whether the marketing strategy for your law company 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 will need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you must make the most of the material you can produce. Following are just a few ideas to help you use the two most reliably 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 some worthwhile, interesting material in any of the forms above, you don’t need to just send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception area. You ought to distribute the content as much as possible. For every piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded to our website?
- Have I emailed it direct 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 could they explain it in detail if a client asks?
- Can I turn it into another kind of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually prepared with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented only once then left to stagnate. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare them results in only a one time presentation. To get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I show it to?
- How could 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?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to people who were unable to 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 discussing topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While some of these ideas might seem like more work just 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 is far easier to add a tiny amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the benefits of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you create some content you’ll 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.