Whether the legal marketing strategy for your law company revolves around 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, 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 best of the material you manage to produce. Following are several suggestions for making sure you use the two most popularly 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 worthwhile, interesting material in any of the types above, don’t just send it off once or print it and let it sit in your reception. You should distribute that content as much as is possible. For each item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded to our 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?
- Are others in my company aware of it and could they explain it further if a client questions them about it?
- Can I turn it into another kind of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally prepared with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented once and then left to stagnate. The large amount of time required to prepare it gets just one presentation. To get much more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else may I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to 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?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog to discuss topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
Although these ideas may feel like additional work just 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 is essential to consider that it is far easier to add a small amount of time at the end to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the benefits of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you 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.