Content Marketing is the act of creating informative, free, and engaging content for your target audience. A successful content marketing strategy is ultimately judged by your ability to meet your set strategic goals. These goals could be anything from increasing your overall brand awareness, establishing expertise and thought leadership in the legal field, growing your online audience, generating leads, or converting sales and clients.
Ideally the best strategy would, to an extent, fulfill all of the above, but having a clear goal from the outset will enable you to plan best. Your content may differ from day to day, with some aiming to promote a product or service, whilst some just provides information for your audience. It is important with each piece of material you have a set idea in mind to make sure that specific piece delivers on its objectives. Often to achieve your goals and get a return, you have to give valuable information away.
Great content marketing plans, if successful, will occupy a significant piece of your lead generation strategy, but it will also provide you with great credibility, visibility, and huge SEO benefits. Here’s a look at the essential best practices for your law firm’s content marketing.
Understand Your Target Audience
Having a clear profile of your target audience is crucial to succeeding in your content marketing plan. You need to know who they are, what problems they face, how they might solve those problems, etc. Try to picture what would motivate someone to buy your service and reciprocate that in your content. Answering the key questions will help you understand what your content needs to contain to connect with your audience.
Build Strong Foundations
You can’t make a pizza without some dough, even if you’ve got the most glamorous toppings in the world. Same goes for your content marketing strategy, you won’t do well if you haven’t got a network with which to share your content. Building a great website through which all your business funnels is crucial. Update, create, and optimise your website’s pages as frequently as you can, and create a smooth and easy user experience. If your pizza has loads of holes in it, the pizza shop round the corner is going to sell more.
Though your website is the funnel, you also need a net. If you aren’t casting a net, nothing’s going to fall through the funnel. Utilise all the lead generation channels you can to spread your content as wide as you can! This could be through social media sharing, email marketing, SEO or paid advertising.
Part of your foundation is also deciding which type of content to produce to address your particular audience. You might have some content that is high reach, informative content, to go to a broader funnel audience, whilst you’ll also have some niche smaller funnel content with sales and ‘call to action’ CTA language.
Add Value
The most obvious part of content marketing is of course the content itself. Make sure that you are creating engaging, consistent content that adds value to your audience. Don’t churn stuff out for the sake of it, but try to demonstrate your competence, experience and knowledge.
Most of your audience will not understand the same depth of legal information or jargon as you. If you’re using big buzzwords, use easy to understand language. Your content needs to be audience-centric!
Remember to not be boring! The legal space has a reputation for long, tedious chunks of writing. Don’t be afraid to utilise individual anecdotes and profiles within your content. Writing more personalised pieces, or telling individual stories can help you establish relationships on a more trusting human to human level. You can also try and use engaging snippets, infographics, polls, quizzes, etc. to try and make your content come to life.
Leverage Thought Leadership
If your content displays significant expertise in a particular area, people will eventually look to you as an expert. You can leverage this expertise and thought leadership to start to shape thinking, ideas, and cultures in the legal space. Sharing information, especially for free will give your reputation some credibility, especially If you’re hyper focused on a specific niche. Deliver the message to your audience that your law firm knows a thing or two.
Don’t Discount SEO
Your content needs to be readable, engaging, and informative, but don’t discount its search engine discoverability. Try and make your readability balance with keyword rich paragraphs. The more content you produce, the more your organic traffic will increase if you nail your technical SEO. Utilise long/short keywords, image tags, video, back/interlinking, etc. across your website and content.
Identifying Your Metrics
As mentioned before, you need to identify your main goals. Once that has been achieved you can begin to segment your plan, and choose specific metrics that you want to track. This is how you measure if you are reaching those goals, and if you’re not, what you might be able to change.
If you wanted to build an audience you might be focusing on the overall reach of your content, whilst if you wanted to generate leads, you would be more interested in tracking the clicks through from your CTA. Focus your goals and KPIs to make sure they’re compatible.
Once these metrics are identified you need to track them, and analyse where your content marketing strategy is successful and meeting goals, and where it isn’t. From there you’ll have the insight to be able to make adjustments or adopt a new strategy.
Final Thoughts
Your content marketing strategy, if well planned, can see you massively improve your lead generation, engagement and reach. Other benefits like your renewed expertise and thought leadership in the legal sector will go a long way to forming stronger relationships with your new and existing clients. Making engaging, authentic, and optimised content, and seeing it distributed as effectively as possible, is a surefire way to see your content marketing strategy reach your goals!
If you have any questions about your content marketing strategy, please get in contact with us here for a free consultation!
