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 your stable of clients, you’ll need to generate 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 manage to produce. Following are just a few suggestions to help you use the two most popularly 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 produced any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the formats above, you don’t need to only send it out once or print it and let it stagnate in your office. You can distribute the 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 onto my website?
- Have I sent it direct 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?
- Is everyone in my company aware of it and can they explain it further if a client questions them?
- Can I transform it into another kind of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a particular audience 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 time required to prepare them gets only a one time showing. If you want to get much more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else could I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to 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 via email or directly?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog to discuss questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
Although these ideas might feel like additional work at a time when you’ve possibly created a dent in your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s important to remember that it is much easier to add a small amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the results of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you 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.