If the marketing strategy for your law company 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 will need to create content.
Content is the lifeblood of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not have a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you must make the best of the material that you manage to produce. Here are just a few suggestions to help you use the two most popularly 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 produced any quality, interesting material in any of the formats mentioned, don’t just send it off once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your office. Distribute the content as much as is possible. For every piece of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded onto my website?
- Have I emailed it directly 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 further if a client questions them?
- Can I turn it into a different type of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually written with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they tend to be presented only once then left to become stale. The large amount of time involved in preparing them gets only a one time showing. If you want to get more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies can 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, or suggested that I present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation 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?
- Can I write an article or blog discussing questions that arose from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
While a lot of these ideas may seem like more 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 important to remember that it’s far easier to add a small amount of time now to really maximise on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the benefits of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you need to create some content you’ll 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.