If the legal marketing strategy for your law firm 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’ll need to create content.
Content is an essential dynamic of legal marketing, and without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you want to make the most of the writing you can produce. Following are several suggestions to help you use the two most commonly produced types of legal marketing content as best you can.
Law Firm Marketing – Written material (blogs, email alerts, brochures, guides, information sheets)
If you have created some worthwhile, interesting material in any of the types above, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and let it sit in your reception area. Distribute the content as widely as is possible. For every item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded to our website?
- Have I emailed it direct to people who have referred me, 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?
- Are others in the firm aware of it and can they explain it further if a client asks about it?
- Can I turn it into another type of content and distribute in a different format?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are generally written with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. As a result they tend to be presented once then left to stagnate. All of the effort and time involved in preparing it gets just one showing. To get far more out of your presentation consider:
- Who else can I present it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send a hard copy of the presentation to those who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Could 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 topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
While some of these ideas may seem like additional 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 necessary to remember that it is far easier to use a small amount of time at the end to really impact on what you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the benefits of the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you 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.