Whether the marketing strategy for your law firm is based on 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 generate content.
Content is an essential part of legal marketing, without it you might just as well not bother with a law firm marketing plan. However, producing content is hard work, and you need to make the best of the material that you can produce. Following are some quick ideas to help you use the two most reliably 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 written any quality, interesting material of any of the types above, don’t just send it off once or print it and let it sit in your reception area. You ought to distribute that content as much as possible. For each item of written material you produce, consider:
- Have I sent 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 it with a post on Facebook and a tweet on Twitter?
- Has it been sent to media contacts?
- Are others in my firm aware of it and can they explain it further if a client questions them?
- Can I transform it into a different style of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually created with a specific reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once then left to become stale. The large amount of effort and time required to prepare it results in only a one time presentation. To get 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 discussed it on my website, Facebook, Twitter, and offered to present it to others?
- Can I send a hard copy of the presentation to people who couldn’t attend the seminar?
- Can 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 to discuss questions that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people that attended the presentation?
Although some of these suggestions may seem 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’s important to remember that it is much easier to add a tiny amount of time at the end to really maximise on the impression you’ve already produced than to produce a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Maximise the benefits of the time you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see 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.