If the legal marketing strategy for your law firm revolves around online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing wallet share of your stable of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content means hard work, and you should make the best of the writing that you can produce. Following are some ideas 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 have written any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the types mentioned, don’t only send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception area. You should distribute the content as broadly as possible. For every piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto our website?
- Have I emailed 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 my company aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client asks?
- Can I turn it into another kind of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented only once and then left to become stale. All of that time involved in preparing them results in just one showing. If you want to get more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else may I show it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or suggested that I 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 during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
While some of these suggestions may feel like additional work just when you’ve possibly damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is crucial to remember that it is much easier to add a small amount of time at the end to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the results of all 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 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.