Whether 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 the lifeblood 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 need to make the most of the material that you can produce. Following are just a few ideas to help 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 some worthwhile, interesting material in any of the formats mentioned, you don’t need to only send it out once or print it and leave it to sit in your office. You should distribute the content as widely as is possible. For every item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I distributed it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded to our 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 my company aware of it and could they explain it in detail if a client asks about it?
- Can I transform it into a different type of content and distribute in a different form?
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 once and then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare it gets just one presentation. To get much more benefit from your presentation consider:
- What other companies can I present it to?
- How could I let the greatest number of people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, or offered to present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy to those who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it via email or directly?
- Is it viable to 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?
Although a lot of these suggestions may feel like more work just when you’ve probably damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is important to consider that it is far easier to use a tiny amount of time now to really maximise on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a whole new piece of legal marketing material.
Improve the benefits of all the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll discover that the next time you need to create content you’ll 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.