Whether 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, without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you should make the most of the material that you manage to produce. Following are some quick ideas for making sure you use the two most reliably 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 any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the types mentioned, you don’t need to just send it out once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your reception area. You can distribute that content as broadly as is possible. For each item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded onto our website?
- Have I sent it directly 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 firm aware of it and could they explain it further if a client asks?
- Can I transform it into a different kind of content and distribute in a different form?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented once then left to stagnate. All of the time involved in preparing them results in only a one time presentation. If you want to get more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies can I show it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Can I 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 that were at the presentation?
While some of these ideas might seem like more work at a time when you’ve possibly damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is important to remember that it’s much easier to add a small amount of time at the end to really impact on what you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the results of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll find that the next time you create 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.