If 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 a solid growth of clients, you will need to generate content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content means hard work, and you want to make the best of the material you can produce. Following are some suggestions to help you use the two most commonly 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 forms above, don’t just send it off once or print it and let it sit in your reception. You should distribute that content as broadly as is possible. For every item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded onto 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?
- Is everyone in my company aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client questions them about it?
- Can I transform it into another kind of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually prepared with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once then left to become stale. The large amount of time required to prepare them results in only a one time presentation. To get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies could I present it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned 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?
- Can I 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 seem 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 important to remember that it is far easier to use a small 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.
Increase the benefits of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you create some content you’ll 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.