If the legal 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 an essential part of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content requires hard work, and you want to make the best of the writing that you can produce. Following are some 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’ve written any worthwhile, interesting material of any of the forms mentioned, you don’t need to just send it out once or print it and let it stagnate in your office. You should distribute the content as widely 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 my website?
- Have I sent it directly 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?
- Can I turn it into another type of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally prepared with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented only once and then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare it results in only a one time showing. To get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can 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 offered to present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation to people who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Can 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 during the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
Although a lot of these ideas might feel like additional work at a time when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is necessary to consider that it’s far easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the results of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover 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.