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 a solid growth of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content means hard work, and you want to make the most of the material you can 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 created any quality, interesting material in any of the forms mentioned, you don’t need to only send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your office. You ought to distribute the content as broadly as possible. For each piece of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto our website?
- Have I sent it direct 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?
- Is everyone in the company aware of it and can they explain it further if a client has queries about it?
- 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 specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once and then left to stagnate. The large amount of effort and time involved in preparing it results in only a one time presentation. If you want to get much more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else could I present it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to 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 via email or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog to discuss questions that arose during the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
While these suggestions might seem like additional 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 essential to consider that it’s far easier to add a small amount of time at the end to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of 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 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.