Whether the marketing strategy for your law firm depends 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, and without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content requires hard work, and you should make the most of the material you can produce. Here are some suggestions to help 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 some quality, interesting material in any of the types above, you don’t need to only send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your office. Distribute the content as much as possible. For every item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto 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?
- Are others in my firm aware of it and can they explain it further if a client asks about it?
- Can I transform it into another type of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally created 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 effort and time involved in preparing them gets only a one time showing. To get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I show it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation to people 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 questions that arose from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
Although these ideas may feel 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’s essential to remember that it is much easier to add a small amount of time at the end to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced 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 find that the next time you create some 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.