If the legal 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 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 must make the best of the writing you can produce. Following are some suggestions to help you use two of the most popularly produced types of legal marketing content as best you can.
Law Firm Marketing – Written material (blogs, email alerts, brochures, guides, information sheets)
If you have written some worthwhile, interesting material of any of the forms mentioned, you don’t need to just send it out once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your office. You should distribute the content as widely as is possible. For every item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto our website?
- Have I emailed it direct to referrers, associates and other professionals?
- Have I linked it with a post on Facebook and a tweet on Twitter?
- Has it been sent to media contacts?
- Are others in the company aware of it and could they explain it further if a client questions them about it?
- Can I transform it into another type of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a specific audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented once then left to become stale. All of the time required to prepare them gets just one presentation. To get more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else may I present it to?
- How can 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 those 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 to discuss topics that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
Although these suggestions may seem like additional 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 is important to consider that it’s much easier to use 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.
Improve the benefits of all the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you create content you will feel more positive about how effective the results 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.