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 a share of your stable of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you should make the most of the material that you manage to produce. Here are several ideas for making sure 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 any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the formats above, don’t only send it off once or print it and let it sit in your reception. Distribute that content as widely as possible. For each item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded onto our website?
- Have I emailed it directly 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?
- Is everyone in the firm aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client questions them?
- Can I transform it into a different style of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented once and then left to stagnate. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing them results in only a one time presentation. If you want to get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies can I present it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation to people who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Could 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 that attended the presentation?
Although some of these ideas might feel like more work just when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is essential to consider 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 to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the results of all the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you need to create 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.