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 will need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you must make the most of the material you can produce. Following are just a few suggestions to help 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 created any quality, interesting material in any of the types mentioned, don’t just send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception. You can distribute that content as much as possible. For each item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded to my website?
- Have I emailed it direct 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?
- Are others in the firm aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client questions them about it?
- Can I turn it into another type of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created 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 effort and time required to prepare them gets just one showing. If you want to get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies could I show it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation to those who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Can I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it electronically online or directly?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog discussing topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
While a lot of these ideas might feel like more 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 essential to remember that it is far easier to add a small amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the results of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you create some content you’ll 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.