The main cog that runs through your entire marketing strategy is your content. Your firm’s content strategy is a fundamental building block for your overall lead generation. It provides direction. Without content to feed through to your socials, your website, and your clients, your lead generation will be pretty desolate.
To create leads with any great quality or quantity you need to have a driven content strategy, there aren’t really any workarounds. For the most part anyway.
You might utilise referrals, for example. There is a reason that referrals work great, they’re probably the most powerful type of lead. Trust is everything, and this is someone who has been directly recommended by someone they trust. Referrals don’t require any form of content fed into them, so they bypass that need. The main drawback though is that referrals aren’t always reliable, sustainable, and scalable.
Whether you’re leaning on reliability, sustainability, or scalability, it matters not. It is risky to generate everything from one source. This is where other pillars can and will assist. Feeding focused content into all your channels is how you’re going to transform your business growth, generating exponentially more leads. It’s where you need an organised content strategy to step in, so what exactly does a content strategy look like for your law firm, and what can you do specifically?
Content Strategy
A content strategy is essentially a planned calendar that you use to achieve your business goals. You need 3 major things to develop this strategy. There are plenty of other key requirements from your content strategy, but at the crux of it you’ll need:
Goals. These might be related to any or all of the following; audience engagement, reach, sales, credibility, website traffic, etc.
To achieve those goals we need to develop some content. This content might take the form of; audio, video, graphics/infographics, written copy, etc.
Now we’ve got the content, we need to put it somewhere. It might fill multiple channels and could be anything ranging from; your website, social media, email, paid ads, etc.
Break everything down into a step-by-step process, and you’ll find what it is that you need!
Goals
Your business goals that drive the strategy are hugely important. This determines the type of content you’re going to deliver. Let’s say you’re trying to gain an audience and expand your reach. The content that you create is going to differ from content you create if you’re trying to sell.
Expanding an audience requires informative and educational content. People come looking for information, and if they see you as the answer to that useful information they’ll keep coming back. Do clients keep asking you about what their etiquette in court should look like? how to behave, what to wear, what to say, what to bring. Find out what people want to know, and write about it, or make a video about it, create something that answers those questions. This is a great way to build an audience.
On the other hand, let’s say you’re trying to generate a sale for your law firm, what is it that people want to see before they commit to something. Well it’s likely to be results and ROI orientated, so display your results. How did you perform for your past clients? What were the results? Where can I find that information? How much is it going to cost me, and are there any common issues/problems? How do we discuss ongoing developments? This type of information is critical to someone making a decision.
People need confirmation, and want to know what they’re getting and for how much. Offering some form of ‘security blanket’ will make your sale far easier. It might be a free initial consultation or a money back guarantee. Find something that makes you less risky.
Content
Copy
There are several types of content you can produce. The most common would probably be long form copy, in the form of either blogs, guides or landing pages. While your long form copy isn’t going to set the world alight with its readership, copy content is great at driving traffic to your site by targeting common and long tail keywords. There are great SEO benefits that accompany long copy content on your firm’s website! It can be time consuming to write and perfect, but they can position you as a key authority in your subject and are a very cost effective method of creating great content. Not only that, but once your copy is published and indexed, it will consistently generate you traffic. It’s not just a short term investment!
Video
Video content is another great example to integrate into your law firm’s content strategy. Examples might include a promotional video, introducing your firm with well scripted and well presented graphics and visuals. Alternatively you could include video testimonials, building credibility and authority amongst new leads. A third example might be educational or explanatory videos about your expert subject. Whilst some audiences prefer copy content, others prefer to learn visually. Video content is a great resource to use on your site for SEO benefits, UX, and engagement rates, whilst it is also highly shareable on social media!
Podcasts & Webinars
Webinars and podcasts are the best way of positioning yourself as an authority on a certain topic, and can be a great way to develop sales qualified leads. While they are in themselves informative pieces of content, you generate question and answer sessions, and open up conversations with new or existing clients. This form of content again is highly shareable, and can be repurposed for a variety of different channels.
It is all about quality not quantity! Finally, try and arrange your content on your site into a dedicated section, where everything is easily navigable. This will massively boost your user experience, especially if you host live and on demand options as a flexible lead generation tool, whether gated or not.
Channels
As a general rule there is almost always a role for all channels. It’s important however, to identify which channels will play a key role in your strategy, and which might play a more supporting role!
Search engines will likely be the main driver of traffic to your website. General queries will always be searched, and you can be found as long as your content is ranking and targeting them. On the other hand, if your law firm has a very specific niche , you’ll be able to target much narrower query terms. Though that might result in less traffic overall, it’s likely that whoever is visiting your site is much more targeted, and therefore a higher quality site visitor than the average search!
While search engines might be a central point to most strategies, there are other channels that can play a significant role. Social media, for example, can be a key part of your strategy. If you’re looking to build a community, share insightful knowledge, and grow your visibility and engagement you really need to utilise social media as a tool. Not every platform will be as useful as the next though. Determine what content suits what platform, and what audience you’re likely to target. This will likely result in you honing on a specific platform or 2 to take full advantage of, whether that’s Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube or something else entirely.
Paid channels on social media alongside search engines, are also critical. If you’re set in a certain location for example, Google makes it very easy to target your audience within that location. Location specific keywords can make ranking by location far easier than just ranking for general queries. On the other hand, if you’re targeting certain age demographics, job titles, and interests, looking at targeted ads on social media is a great option too. Developing a scalable CPA model for paid PPC ads across a variety of paid channels will see your lead generation grow! Just make sure you have a focused and targeted approach!
There’s also lots of room in the B2B market for affiliate and influencer strategies! While chucking lots of money at an ‘A-list’ influencer isn’t going to get you great results, choosing relevant experts who align with your audience and business goals can be rewarding. You can leverage credibility, access new audiences, and you get some great content as a result!
One of the most important (yet overlooked) pillars to a content strategy is email. Email is hyper targeted, can be personalised, and is an owned channel. You own your email list. Unless you’re Mark Zuckerberg or some other tech mogul you don’t own social media, so you’re always building a profile on someone else’s land. If they decide to change advertising rules and costs so that it’s no longer profitable for your law firm, you can’t do much about it.
Email gives you an opportunity to target and re-target very narrow groups of people. Your email list will grow over time, whether that’s by generating them with CTA’s, buying lists, or manually researching them.
Finally, there’s always something to be said for ‘old school’ offline channels. Cutting through the noise online is tricky. It’s a crowded space after all. Don’t disregard traditional marketing channels. Events, bus/train stations, leaflets and flyers, a signed sealed and delivered Hogwarts letter… There’s tonnes of ideas if you get creative!
If you’re looking for some more information about your content and digital marketing strategy, please contact us here for a free consultation!
