If the marketing strategy for your law firm is based on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of your stable of clients, you’ll need to generate content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, 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 most of the material you manage to produce. Following are some suggestions for making sure you use two of the 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 produced some worthwhile, interesting material of any of the formats mentioned, don’t only send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception area. You should distribute that content as broadly as is possible. For every item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded to my website?
- Have I emailed 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 firm aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client has queries about it?
- Can I turn it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually written with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented only once and then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing them results in only a one time showing. If you want to get much more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Can I 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 discussing topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
While some of these suggestions might feel like additional work at a time when you’ve possibly damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s important to consider that it’s much easier to use a tiny amount of time now to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the benefits of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you need to 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.