If the 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 a solid growth of clients, you will need to create 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 requires hard work, and you should make the most of the material that you manage to produce. Following are several suggestions to help you use the two most commonly 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 created any worthwhile, interesting material in any of the types above, don’t just send it off once or print it and let it sit in your office. Distribute the content as widely as is possible. For every item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been 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?
- Are others in my company aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client questions them about it?
- 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 specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented only once and then left to stagnate. All of the time required to prepare them results in just one presentation. If you want to get far more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies could I present it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy to those who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it via email or directly?
- Is it viable to write an article or blog discussing topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While a lot of these ideas may seem like more work just when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it’s essential to consider that it is far 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.
Maximise the results of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you need to create 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.