Whether the legal marketing strategy for your law firm is based 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 generate content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you should make the best of the writing that you manage to produce. Following are some quick suggestions for making sure you use two of the most commonly produced types of legal marketing content as best you can.
Law Firm Marketing – Written material (blogs, email alerts, brochures, guides, information sheets)
If you’ve produced some worthwhile, interesting material of any of the forms mentioned, don’t just send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception area. You should distribute that content as widely as is possible. For every item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded to my 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 the firm aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client asks about it?
- Can I turn it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally prepared with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented once then left to stagnate. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing it gets just one showing. If you want to get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else may I show it to?
- How can 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?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy to those 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 to discuss topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
Although a lot of these ideas might seem like more work just when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s crucial to remember that it’s much easier to add a tiny amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you need to create content you will 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.