If the marketing strategy for your law firm depends on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of a solid growth of clients, you’ll 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. But producing content requires hard work, and you must make the most of the writing you manage to produce. Following are just a few ideas for making sure 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 produced some worthwhile, interesting material in any of the forms mentioned, you don’t need to just send it out once or print it and leave it to stagnate in your office. You ought to distribute the content as much as possible. For every item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as I can?
- Is it loaded onto my website?
- Have I sent it direct to people who have referred me, 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 the firm aware of it and can they explain it further if a client asks?
- Can I transform it into a different style of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they are often presented once then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing it results in just one showing. To get more out of your presentation consider:
- What other companies could I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I 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 to discuss questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
While these suggestions may feel 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 is essential to remember that it’s much easier to use 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.
Increase the benefits of all the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you 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.