Did you know that there are about 200 million active websites on the internet today? In a crowd that large, trying to make your voice heard can seem impossible.
A good content marketing strategy can not only help you get your website in front of more clients, but it can also help to establish you as a trusted expert in the field.
Below, we dive into what content marketing is and how law firms can develop a content marketing strategy that delivers results.
What Is Content Marketing for Law Firms?
Content marketing is a broad tactic that spans a variety of specific efforts.
It essentially covers all work focused on creating helpful content for your potential clients. This can include web pages, blog posts, educational materials, social media, and so on.
Content marketing is a blend of creativity and strategy.
You need to consider the practical aspects of what information potential clients are searching for and what will generate the best return for your firm. But you also need to ensure the content is engaging and informative.
Does Content Marketing Work?
Content marketing can be important for several facets of your marketing strategy. It’s critical for SEO, as having more content gives you more opportunities to rank in search results and builds your overall site reputation.
Having lots of valuable content can also improve your reputation with potential clients and increase your brand awareness.
All of this serves to bring more leads into your firm and helps to build trust even before you make contact with that lead.
Create Relevant, Valuable Content
The first and most important thing you need to focus on with your content marketing is creating valuable content for your current and potential clients.
This content should be relevant to their interests and your business; your clients probably don’t care about learning the best way to style a fanny pack when they visit your site.
We’ll discuss how to find strong topics in a moment, but you also need to make sure the content you create is clear, engaging, and informative. And, of course, you should take advantage of this opportunity to encourage readers to contact you for help with their problems!
Content Plan vs. Content Strategy
Did you know that content marketing plans and content strategies are actually two different things?
Much like a general marketing strategy, a content marketing strategy outlines your goals and defines how you’ll approach your content strategically to achieve those goals. It deals with the more conceptual part of your content marketing, rather than the practical.
Your content marketing plan, on the other hand, deals with the practicality of how you’ll implement the strategy you just designed. Who will write your content, what review stages will the content go through, and when will it get published?
It’s important to have both a good content strategy and a content plan in place before you launch your content marketing machine.
Create a Clear Strategy
When you get ready to launch into content marketing, the first thing you need to do is create a clear strategy.
- Defining your target audience – Who do you want to be reading your content, and what are they like? If you’ve already written a business plan for your law firm, you may want to revisit the target audience section of that document during this step.
- Set specific goals for your content – What do you want to get from this marketing strategy, and what will successful content look like for you? You may want to consider using the SMART model for these goals: smart, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.
- Focus on your unique value propositions – Your content strategy should also include which unique value propositions you’ll focus on in your content marketing. Again, you can refer back to your business plan during this section.
- Decide where you want to publish your content – We’ll discuss how to decide which channels will provide the most value for you in a moment.
Setting your strategy early can help guide your content marketing efforts and prevent a lot of wasted time and effort.
Know Your Channels
As you’re developing your content strategy, you’ll need to figure out which channels you want to focus on. There are several different channels you can publish content on, including your website, social media platforms, video platforms, audio platforms, and email newsletters.
Each of these channels has its own strengths and drawbacks, and which ones you choose to pursue will depend on your priorities and target audience.
SEO
Content that goes out on your website helps contribute to your search engine optimization strategy.
SEO content can include blog posts, longer-form resource pages, practice area pages, contact pages, and more. Done correctly, the content on these pages will help your site appear higher in search results.
LawRank can help you write content that will consistently improve your search engine rankings.
Social Media
Social media is the great advertising equalizer, and it can be an important part of your content strategy.
Not only can you use these platforms to promote your web content, but you can also create content specifically for these platforms that can help you build a larger following. And that following can turn into cases when your followers find themselves in need of a lawyer.
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, X, and Threads are all popular platforms for lawyers to create content on.
Video
Video content can overlap some with social media content, especially if you’re posting on Instagram or TikTok. But you can also choose to create longer-form videos to post on platforms like YouTube or Spotify for Podcasters.
Videos like this give you an opportunity to connect more directly with your audience.
You may choose to answer common questions you hear from clients, conduct interviews with other industry professionals, or educate the public about the legal system.
Audio
If you like the personal touch of video but don’t want to deal with the high production demands, audio can be a great option. Starting a podcast gives you an opportunity to connect with your followers (and potential clients) regularly.
You can discuss many of the same topics as you would in a long-form video, and you may even be able to recycle some of the same content if it works for a podcast format.
Email newsletters are a great way to stay in touch with your former and future clients. Sending these newsletters out regularly keeps you at the front of readers’ minds and improves the chances that they’ll call you when they need a lawyer.
Your newsletters can include some of the content we’ve already discussed, including new blog posts or podcast episodes. You can also highlight recent victories, answer FAQs, or give other firm updates.
Picking the Right Channels
It’s important to note that you don’t need to create content for every single one of these channels, especially at first. Which channels you choose depends on a variety of factors.
Think about your target audience and what media they use.
If you work in estate planning, social media may not be a great choice for you. If you’re a personal injury lawyer, an email newsletter may not connect with your potential clients, since no one expects to get hurt in an accident.
It’s also a good idea to consider your own strengths and weaknesses.
Are you a very people-oriented, charismatic person? Video, audio, and social media channels may allow you to connect with your audience in a more authentic way.
Do you prefer to communicate in writing and carefully review what you’ve written before you send it out? Web content and email newsletters may be better suited to your skills.
If you’re handling your content marketing yourself (rather than hiring a marketing firm to do it for you), don’t spend effort forcing yourself to make content for a channel you’re not comfortable with. Your audience will pick up on your discomfort, and you’ll be less likely to stick to your content marketing plan.
Find Strong Topics
Once you’ve nailed down which channels you want to put content out on, it’s time to start figuring out which topics you’d like to write about.
There are several ways you can come up with a list of topics to cover on each of your content channels.
Put Yourself in Your Audience’s Shoes
To begin with, you may want to consider topics that fill a need for your audience.
- What questions do you hear most commonly from clients or leads?
- What misconceptions do you find yourself correcting most often?
- What do your clients care most about?
- What factors impact the types of cases you most commonly handle?
When you start answering questions your audience is already asking, you meet them where they are and you have a better chance of offering them content that they’ll value.
This is where your target audience profile can come in handy. Take a look back at that profile and
Do Your Keyword Research
Keyword research can be a great way to ensure you’re writing content that’s more likely to perform. You don’t have to guess which topics your audience is going to respond to; you can look at what’s ranking well for your competitors and write content on those topics!
Tools like Semrush and Google Keyword Planner can help you figure out what keywords are performing well for your competitors. Writing about these topics and using those specific keywords can help you write content that’s more likely to perform without all the guesswork.
Repurpose Ideas
Sometimes, the best topics may actually be ones you’ve already written about. If you have a topic that’s performing well for your competitors but isn’t getting much traffic for you, it may be time to look at reworking or repurposing it.
Look at the differences between your competitors’ articles and yours. Do they cover topics you don’t or include different keywords than you have?
Once you find these discrepancies, work on making your content align more closely with the top-performing content you’re seeing from your competitors. And if the content is just too different and needs a total rewrite, look for sections that you can repurpose into other articles.
Write Helpful Content
As you’re working on your content marketing, it’s important to remember Google’s number-one goal: to provide a positive experience for its users. Google wants to highlight sites that provide a good, helpful user experience.
Focusing on writing helpful content for your audience can help your site show up higher in the rankings. There are a few things you can do to make your content more helpful for readers.
Keep It Simple
When you’re writing about the legal world, it can be easy to get caught up in your expertise and the complexity of the issue. You may wind up writing an article that dives way further into the technical aspects of the issue than needed.
Remember, your reader is unlikely to be a legal expert themselves. They don’t necessarily need the full in-depth exploration of the topic; they just need to know the basics.
Keep your writing simple, easy to understand by a layperson, and brief. Aiming for a 9th- to 11th-grade reading level is best. And whenever reasonable, always use active voice.
Be Specific and Comprehensive
That being said, making sure your content is comprehensive is also important. It’s all about balance – you don’t want to overwhelm the reader with extraneous detail or fluff, but you also don’t want to leave them unsatisfied and still searching for an answer.
Looking at the information your competitors are covering in similar articles can be helpful when deciding what you want to include in your article. Not only is it a good idea to cover the same topics, but you may also want to look at what information they missed in their article.
Remember, the idea is to write a better, more helpful article than any of your competitors.
Make It Skimmable
The challenge of writing for a digital audience is that readers’ attention spans tend to be very short. People don’t want to slog through a tome of information; they want articles that are easy to skim and get information from quickly.
Using short paragraphs, bullet points, and subheads can all help to make your content more skimmable.
Adding a table of contents at the beginning of these articles can also help readers quickly navigate to the information they’re looking for.
Avoid Language That Dates Your Content
As you’re creating content for your site, you want to make sure it won’t become outdated too quickly. Ideally, your content should remain relevant for years.
To this end, you want to avoid using language that dates your content. Things like “last year,” “this week,” or “at the conference next week” will make your content irrelevant in relatively short order.
Instead, use specific dates (i.e. December 2023) instead of relative times. And avoid talking about upcoming events wherever possible.
The exception, of course, is content you intend to update year after year, including statistical articles or gift lists.
Use Content Creation Tools
There are some tools that can make your content creation process easier and a little more effective.
- Hemingway – Hemingway is a tool that analyzes your writing and shows you how to make it more digestible for an audience. It highlights instances of passive voice, overuse of adverbs, and complex sentences and suggests ways to simplify them. It also shows you the reading comprehension level of your work – remember, you want to keep it at a Grade 9 or below.
- Grammarly – Grammarly is a program that reads your work directly in your browser or wherever you may be working and acts as a grammar checker. Not only does it point out spelling and grammar errors, but it makes suggestions for how to make your writing more clear and concise.
- ChatGPT – ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence tool that can help you draft content. It is important to note that this should not be the only tool you rely on to generate content. Google is currently punishing sites that rely only on AI to generate their content. But ChatGPT can be a great way to get a first draft, collect your thoughts, rework existing content, or do formulaic writing.
These tools can be a great way to speed up your writing process, make your content easier for readers to consume, and make it more SEO-friendly.
Repurpose Content
When you’ve put all the time and effort into writing an article, it doesn’t make sense to only use that content in one place. Repurposing content can help you reach a broader audience and get the most utility out of your content.
That being said, you don’t want to just copy and paste content across channels. The people who follow you on social media or subscribe to your newsletter aren’t looking for the same things that people who read your blog are.
Take content you’ve created and adapt the topics to each platform’s needs. You can create videos and infographics for social media and write smaller snippets to include in newsletters.
Best of all, once you’ve created interest in readers looking for more, you can lead them back to your website to read the original content you created!
Give It Time
One of the most important things to remember when you’re first implementing a content strategy is to give it time.
Building a steady stream of traffic isn’t something that happens overnight. You have to build a good library of helpful content and get that indexed by Google. You also have to get a good collection of backlinks both to and from your website.
Be patient as you’re getting your content strategy off the ground, and don’t expect immediate runaway success.
Track Your Performance
Of course, there does come a point at which it’s time to adjust your content strategy to achieve better results. It’s important to track your performance and make sure you’re making progress.
There are a few key metrics you should keep an eye on, including
- Website traffic
- Web page views
- Ranking keywords
- Social media followers
- Which channels are generating cases
If you aren’t seeing improvement in these areas, or if the results start to dip, you can adjust your strategy accordingly.
Bring In the Professionals
A content strategy can be a great way to bring more traffic to your website, establish yourself as an expert in your field, and build trust with potential clients. Start by creating a clear strategy and determining which channels you’ll pursue. From there, you’ll need to find strong topics, focus on writing helpful content, and repurpose that content across channels.
If you’d like professional guidance with your content strategy, LawRank is here to help. Attorneys write and edit all of our content, and our SEO expertise has helped dozens of firms get on the first page of search results. Contact us today and start getting law firm marketing that works.
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