Whether the legal marketing strategy for your law company 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, without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content requires hard work, and you should make the best of the writing that you manage to produce. Here are some suggestions for making sure you use the two most reliably 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 worthwhile, interesting material in any of the formats above, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception. Distribute the content as widely as possible. For each item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Has it been loaded onto our website?
- Have I sent it direct 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?
- Is everyone in the company aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client asks?
- Can I turn it into another type of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually prepared with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented once and then left to stagnate. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing them results in just one showing. To get far more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else may I show it to?
- How can I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Can I send the presentation in hard copy to those who couldn’t 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 discussing topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While these ideas 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’s necessary to consider that it’s far easier to use a tiny amount of time now to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the benefits of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you need to create some content you will 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.