If the marketing strategy for your law firm depends on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of a solid growth of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you must make the most of the writing you can produce. Following are just a few suggestions for making sure you use the two most popularly 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 written some quality, interesting material in any of the forms mentioned, you don’t need to just send it out once or print it and let it stagnate in your reception. Distribute that content as much as is possible. For every item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded to my website?
- Have I sent it directly to people who have referred me, 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 company aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client asks?
- Can I turn it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once and then left to stagnate. All of that time required to prepare it results in just one presentation. If you want to get much more benefit from 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 my website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation to those who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it via email or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog to discuss topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While a lot of these ideas may seem like more work just when you’ve possibly damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is essential to remember that it is far easier to add a tiny amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the benefits of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you 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.