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 wallet share of your stable of clients, you’ll need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you must make the best of the writing you manage to produce. Here are some ideas 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 created some worthwhile, interesting material in any of the forms mentioned, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception area. You ought to distribute the content as widely as is possible. For each 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 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 my company aware of it and can they explain it further if a client questions them?
- Can I turn it into another type of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually written with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented once then left to become stale. All of that effort and time involved in preparing it gets only a one time showing. If you want to get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else could I show it to?
- How could I let the most 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 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 followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
Although a lot of these ideas may seem 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 is necessary to consider that it’s far easier to add a small amount of time now to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than to produce 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 see that the next time you need to create content you’ll 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.