If the legal marketing strategy for your law firm is based on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing wallet share of your stable of clients, you’ll need to generate content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content means hard work, and you should make the best of the writing you can produce. Following are just a few suggestions to help you use the two 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’ve created some quality, interesting material of any of the formats above, don’t only send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception area. You should distribute that content as widely as is possible. For every piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded to our website?
- Have I emailed it directly 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 can they explain it in detail if a client questions them?
- Can I transform it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented once then left to become stale. The large amount of time required to prepare them gets only a one time showing. To get much 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 mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation 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?
- Can I write an article or blog discussing questions that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that were at the presentation?
While these suggestions might feel like more work just when you’ve probably created a dent in your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s necessary to remember that it’s much easier to add a small amount of time now to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the results of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see 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.