If the marketing strategy for your law company 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’ll need to create content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you should make the best 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 written any quality, interesting material of any of the forms mentioned, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and let it stagnate in your reception area. You should distribute that content as broadly as is 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 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 the company aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client questions them?
- Can I transform it into a different type of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally prepared with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented once then left to stagnate. The large amount of time involved in preparing it gets only a one time showing. If you want to get more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else could I show it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy to people who were unable to 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 to discuss topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
While these suggestions may feel like more 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’s important to consider that it’s far easier to add a small amount of time now to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the benefits of all the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you need to 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.