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 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. But producing content is hard work, and you must make the best of the writing you manage to produce. Following are just a few suggestions for making sure you use two of the 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 written some quality, interesting material of any of the formats above, you don’t need to just send it out once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception. You should distribute the content as broadly as possible. For every item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded to our website?
- Have I sent 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?
- Are others in the company aware of it and can they explain it further if a client questions them about it?
- Can I turn it into a different type of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented once then left to stagnate. All of that time required to prepare it gets just one showing. If you want to get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else could 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, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation to people who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it electronically online or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog discussing questions that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
While these ideas may feel 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 important to consider that it’s far easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the results of all the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you create some content you will feel more positive about how effective the results 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.