Get more marketing benefits from your writing.
Educating potential customers through content is an excellent way to attract new clients to your practice. The crux is how to continually create great content while doing what you do best: being a lawyer.
Fortunately, repurposing content is a fantastic way to get more mileage out of the content you do have time to write. Here’s how you can turn a single article into multiple marketing materials.
1. Turn it into a Blog Post
The easiest thing to do with your initial article is post it to your blog. Keep in mind the topics your audience is most interested in. For example, if you’re in bankruptcy law, you could write a post outlining the differences between Chapter 7 and 13.
2. Dive Deeper in an Ebook
For topics that you can only skim in a blog post (the bankruptcy example comes back to mind), consider expanding on the topics and building out an ebook or whitepaper of 5 to 10 pages in length. Here, you’ve got more opportunity to cover all the angles of a topic, provide tips, and explore options.
At the end of your ebook, make sure to include a call to action to encourage readers to contact you for a free consultation.
3. Create a Video
Some people learn best by reading articles, while others prefer videos. You can take the same information you covered in your initial article and turn it into an interesting video. There’s no need to read it verbatim; you’ll only sound like a robot. Instead, write a quick script or simply speak from your own knowledge.
Post the video to your blog as well as video sharing sites like YouTube.
4. Send an Email
Keeping in regular communication with your clients and contacts is essential for staying top of mind. But there’s no need to write new content every time you send a newsletter. Simply take the blog post you published and use it in the newsletter.
Here’s a tip: only include 75% of the post in the newsletter, then include a link to the rest of the article. This gets people clicking to your blog, as well as to your website.
5. Write a Press Release
If your initial article or piece of content involved research, statistics, or news, it can easily be turned into a press release. Just format it appropriately and send it out through a news distribution service. Then post the link for the press release on your web page’s News page.
6. Share on Social Media
The wonderful thing about social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google + is that you can share all of what you’ve repurposed here. If you wrote a blog post, post a quote from the article on your profiles along with the link. If you published a press release, share the headline and link. Share the video. Share a link to sign up for the ebook.
Schedule multiple updates with your piece(s) of content throughout several weeks to maximize the number of people who see them and click to read.
7. Create Conversations in Groups and Forums
If you use LinkedIn Groups or answer questions on Quora, you can use your articles as a launchpad for new conversations. Say you’re a member of a group for small business owners on LinkedIn, and someone asks a question about bankruptcy. You can answer the question, certainly, but you can also share a link to any of your pieces of content.
8. Write Multiple Blog Posts
If your original post was well-received, consider diving even deeper with a series of posts. For the Chapter 7 vs. 13 topic, you could create separate posts weighing the pros and cons of each, as well as posts looking at scenarios where each type of bankruptcy filing worked best.
9. Create a Presentation
Using your content, you can create a slide show or presentation to attract busy people who don’t have time to read an entire article (yes, those people exist). Posting your presentation on SlideShare will help you reach a wider audience, as the presentations often fall under Google search results.
10. Develop a Webinar
Once you have that slide show, you’re one step away from it being a full-fledged presentation. Set up a webinar through Google Hangouts or other service and market it to your target demographic. You already have the content; now all you need is to present it to your audience.
There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel. Take your content and multiply it with a little effort to create diverse types of content to market your practice.
