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 a share of your stable of clients, you will need to generate content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, and without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you want to make the best of the material you manage to produce. Following are some suggestions 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 created any quality, interesting material in any of the formats above, don’t just send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception. You can distribute that content as widely as is possible. For each item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded onto my website?
- Have I sent 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?
- Is everyone in the firm aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client asks?
- Can I transform it into another style of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually prepared with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented only once and then left to stagnate. All of that time involved in preparing them gets just one presentation. To get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else can I show it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy to those who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Can 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 from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
Although these suggestions may feel like additional work at a time 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 important to consider that it is much easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of 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 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.