Amongst all the hustle and bustle of running a law firm, content marketing (or even any kind of marketing in general) can fall to the wayside. This is a vital mistake! As more and more of the world goes online, content has never been more essential to winning clients. Content marketing for law firms has plenty of benefits that make it worth investing your time into. Good quality content that’s properly targeted to your ideal audiences is great at netting profitable business.
But the whole wide world of content marketing for law firms can feel like a daunting place. Where do you start? What do you need to cover? How do you create content? Well, worry not, because we’re here to help you master all things content with our expert guide to content marketing for law firms.
We’ve already explained what content marketing is and sold you on its many benefits here. So, we’re going to assume you’re more than ready to get started.
Content strategy for law firms
Before you can get into the thick of it, you need to outline your content strategy. Without a strategy in place, your content is in danger of becoming aimless. It’s like trying to win a case with no evidence – pretty difficult!
In our last blog post, we walked you through everything you need to build a strong content strategy. If you’re a learned content student, skip this part! But if you can’t quite recall, not to worry. We’ll recap our five steps to creating a great content marketing strategy:
Research your target audience
If you want your content to have an impact, you need to have in-depth knowledge about your target audience. You’ll need to know all sorts about them to really connect with that audience. What their interests are. Where they hang about online. Their typical job title. Hobbies. All this and more is vital information to have. Know your audience like the back of your hand to ensure you’re creating something that’ll interest them.
Engaging content
This one’s a bit of a no-brainer, but it’s worth stating the obvious sometimes. If you want people to engage with your content, you have to create content that is genuinely engaging. There’s no huge secret or big hack to content marketing. It’s consistent quality content that gets results. Every piece of content should provide value to your audience and should further the narrative of your law firm and its services.
Distributing
We’re said it once and we’ll say it again: C.O.D.E. Did you get that? Create once, distribute everywhere. It’s not cheating to spread your content as far and wide as it can go. If you’ve made a great, informative article, create an asset for it and share it on your Facebook. Then, head on over to your newsletter and put it there, too. Share it on LinkedIn. Put it on the front page of your website. Put it everywhere to ensure you get the absolute most out of the content you’re creating.
Calls to action
All this content creating won’t be worth anything if it’s not actually generating new leads for your firm. That’s where calls to action come in. Check out our ultimate guide for more information! See what we did there? That’s a call to action. You’re instructing the viewer and motivating them into the desired action. Make sure to include at least one call to action with every piece of content.
Performance metrics
Ask any content marketer – we’ve all created some duds. And that’s alright! It’s a part of content marketing. Sometimes things work and sometimes they don’t. What’s important is learning from it and using all the analytics at your disposal to continually create content that scores.
The four key types of content marketing for law firms
Now that we’ve recapped content marketing strategy, it’s time we got elbow-deep into actually starting your content marketing. All online content can fit neatly into four categories. Each of these categories has a different purpose and is essential to use together to help generate the maximum leads.
1. Increased reach content
The first type of content is ‘increased reach.’ Increased reach content is designed to help reach new potential clients. This kind of content is designed to be found through search engines. As such, it’s search-engine-optimised (otherwise known as SEO) and full of keywords that potential clients might be searching for. Generally, this content comes in the form of blog posts or landing pages – content that lives on your website. When it comes to content marketing for law firms, this is the content that historically has been most popular.
2. News and events content
The second type of content is ‘news and events.’ As its name implies, news and events content is all about issues occasions that affect your law firm. This genre of content can be trickier to anticipate because its reactionary by nature. Through news and events content, you’re trying to provoke a response or reaction from your potential audience. It should be an event that you have both a strong opinion and a unique angle on. Also, it should be relevant to your firm’s services and offerings. You might feel strongly about a recent sporting match, but if it doesn’t have anything to do with your firm’s services, we’d advise you keep it on your personal profile!
3. Ultimate guides content
The third type of content is ‘ultimate guides.’ Ultimate guide content is in-depth and well-researched that provides tonnes of value to the viewer. These pieces of content should be highly specialised and go into huge amounts of detail. Most lawyers are well primed to churn out this type of content as its prime for lengthy explanations. Don’t hold back! Ultimate guide content is prime for longtail searches. These are the lengthier searches that are often in the form of questions.
4. Repurposed content
The fourth type of content is ‘repurposed.’ Repurposed content is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s old content that you’ve brushed up and given a new coat of paint. Take your outdated, old blog posts, landing pages, whitepapers or articles and add new, exciting content. This kind of content is great for busy firms as half the work is already done for you.
If your law firm could use some creative content marketing to help engage your target audience, contact us for a free consultation and discover how we can help elevate your brand with our expertise.
