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, without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you need to make the most of the material you manage to produce. Following are several ideas to help you use two of the most commonly 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 written any quality, interesting material in any of the types above, you don’t need to only send it off once or print it and let it sit in your reception. You ought to distribute that content as widely as possible. For each piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded to my website?
- Have I sent it directly 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 could they explain it in detail if a client asks?
- Can I turn it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented once then left to become stale. The large amount of time involved in preparing them results in just one presentation. If you want to get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy 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?
- 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 who were at the presentation?
While a lot of these ideas may seem 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 use a tiny amount of time now to really maximise 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 you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you need to create 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.