If the marketing strategy for your law firm revolves around online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of a solid growth of clients, you will need to create content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, without it you may as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you need to make the most of the material you manage to produce. Here are just a few suggestions to help you use two of the most popularly produced types of legal marketing content as best you can.
Law Firm Marketing – Written material (blogs, email alerts, brochures, guides, information sheets)
If you’ve written some worthwhile, interesting material of any of the formats above, you don’t need to just send it out once or print it and let it sit in your reception area. Distribute the content as much as is possible. For each item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Is it loaded onto our website?
- Have I sent it directly 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 firm aware of it and could they explain it further if a client has queries about it?
- Can I turn it into another style of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a particular audience in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented only once then left to stagnate. All of the effort and time involved in preparing it gets just one presentation. If you want to get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else could I present it to?
- How can I let the most people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or 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 discussing topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I sent additional content to all the people who were at the presentation?
While these ideas might seem like more 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’s important to remember that it’s far easier to use a tiny 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.
Maximise the benefits of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you 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.