How Law Firms Can Get Started With Content Marketing

What does con­tent mar­ket­ing have to do with law firms? Just like in any oth­er indus­tries, lead­ing law firms are using con­tent mar­ket­ing to build their brand, attract new clients, and grow their revenue.

Accord­ing to the 2015 State of Dig­i­tal & Con­tent Mar­ket­ing for Law Firms Sur­vey, the amount of law firm blogs has increas­es by four times in the last five years

With so many oth­er law firms cre­at­ing new con­tent every day, how do you ensure your poten­tial clients will choose to read your con­tent over your com­peti­tors’ content?

And if your law firm is com­plete­ly new to con­tent mar­ket­ing, how do you edu­cate your team, get their buy-in and start dri­ving your con­tent mar­ket­ing efforts?

What Is Content Marketing?

Con­tent mar­ket­ing is a strate­gic mar­ket­ing approach to attract, engage and ulti­mate­ly con­vert your tar­get audi­ence into cus­tomers through the valu­able, rel­e­vant con­tent you cre­ate and publish.

So, imag­ine your firm was the top search result for “How to find a lawyer?” More of your poten­tial new clients would find out about your firm, see it as a trust­wor­thy source, and they would be more like­ly to chose your firm if your spe­cial­ties align with their legal needs.

Unlike adver­tis­ing, con­tent mar­ket­ing is about con­nect­ing with your poten­tial clients with­out sell­ing. Rather than pitch­ing unwant­ed mar­ket­ing mes­sages to poten­tial clients about your ser­vices, con­tent mar­ket­ing is about deliv­er­ing infor­ma­tion and insights to help your tar­get clients make bet­ter, more informed deci­sions with a law firm decision.

Con­tent mar­ket­ing is about help­ing your poten­tial clients solve the tough­est prob­lems and pain points that are keep­ing them up at night.

How Content Marketing Can Grow Your Law Firm

You’re prob­a­bly think­ing, if I’m pro­vid­ing free expert insights and answers to the legal ques­tions a poten­tial client may have, wouldn’t that make them less like­ly to hire my law firm? No. Rather, they are more like­ly going to hire you.

The fact is that each legal case and issue is unique, and your con­tent can­not, and is not meant to, sub­sti­tute legal consultation.

But by offer­ing use­ful infor­ma­tion that is just enough to answer a poten­tial client’s ini­tial ques­tions, you’re posi­tion­ing your law firm as an expert and author­i­ty on a giv­en issue or top­ic, and this effec­tive­ly builds trust with your poten­tial clients.

Over 80% of today’s con­sumers con­duct online research before mak­ing a deci­sion, and one of the first places they go is search engines.

By pub­lish­ing valu­able con­tent, using the rel­e­vant key­words your poten­tial clients are search­ing for, you can help your law firm’s site rank high­er in search engine results, which makes it eas­i­er for peo­ple to find your prac­tice online.

Accord­ing to this study on the top 10 search engine results, which looked at over 20,000 key­words, it found that web­sites which rank in the top 10 results on Google for any key­words have at least 2,000 words.

But this doesn’t mean that cre­at­ing more con­tent, just for the sake of get­ting your web­site up to 2,000 words, will auto­mat­i­cal­ly help your law firm land in the top 10 search results.

Today’s search engines are sophis­ti­cat­ed enough to iden­ti­fy which web­sites offer real val­ue to peo­ple, and which are manip­u­lat­ing search rankings.

By con­sis­tent­ly pub­lish­ing con­tent that deliv­ers valu­able, rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion peo­ple are look­ing for when they do a search, that’s how Google will reward your web­site with a high­er search engine ranking.

By improv­ing the vis­i­bil­i­ty and rank­ing of your law firm’s web­site in search results, you can effec­tive­ly increase your web­site traf­fic to gen­er­ate more leads, which ulti­mate­ly con­verts into more clients and rev­enue for your practice.

It’s been found that inbound mar­ket­ing approach­es like con­tent mar­ket­ing can save com­pa­nies as much as $20,000 a year on adver­tis­ing, and can gen­er­ate more qual­i­ty leads that actu­al­ly deliv­er real val­ue for businesses.

Some Examples of Law Firm Content Marketing

One of the best ways for law firms to get start­ed with con­tent mar­ket­ing is to mim­ic the suc­cess of some of the best law firm con­tent mar­ket­ing examples.

Now most attor­neys will be famil­iar with pop­u­lar legal web­sites such as the ABA Jour­nal, the LexBlog, Attor­ney At Work. Law.com and their sis­ter site The Amer­i­can Lawyer. But these web­sites are online pub­lish­ers who sell ads or mem­ber­ships. They are not law firms.

But here are some real law­some firms (like what I did there?) blog­ging, writ­ing, and help­ing us lay folks under­stand var­i­ous aspects of the law:

• BeLaborThe­P­oint by Stearns, Weaver and Miller
• All About Adver­tis­ing Law by Venable
• Can­na Law Blog on legal issue in the cannabis industry
• Trade­markol­o­gy by Stites and Harbison
• Bak­er McKenzie
• Good­win
• Covington’s Inside Privacy
• PhillyInjuryLawyer.com by Joel Kof­sky will help you under­stand the lia­bil­i­ty of tex­ting and walking
• Den­nis Crouch’s Patent­lyO is a nice­ly curat­ed site on patent news

How To Get Your Law Firm Started With Content Marketing

So with all these obvi­ous ben­e­fits with con­tent mar­ket­ing, how can your law firm actu­al­ly get start­ed with it? Here are 5 tips to help you get the most out of your con­tent mar­ket­ing efforts:

Document Your Content Marketing Strategy

Accord­ing to the 2016 B2B Con­tent Mar­ket­ing: Bench­marks, Bud­gets, and Trends study from Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Insti­tute (CMI) and Mar­ket­ing­Profs, 53% of the most effec­tive mar­keters have a doc­u­ment­ed con­tent mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy. But the 2015 State of Dig­i­tal & Con­tent Mar­ket­ing for Law Firms Sur­vey found that only 13% of respon­dents have a doc­u­ment­ed con­tent strat­e­gy for their legal con­tent mar­ket­ing efforts.

With­out a strat­e­gy that clear­ly defines your con­tent mar­ket­ing goals, you’re unlike­ly going to know if the con­tent you’re cre­at­ing is tru­ly work­ing and deliv­er­ing val­ue for your law firm.

An effec­tive con­tent strat­e­gy should define and doc­u­ment your key objec­tives, tar­get audi­ence, con­tent top­ics and types, pub­lish­ing sched­ule, pro­mo­tion plan and the met­rics you’ll use to mea­sure your con­tent mar­ket­ing results. This sim­ple guide will help you cre­ate a con­tent mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy that works.

Understand And Serve Your Target Audience

Who is the audi­ence you’re tar­get­ing? What legal top­ics and issues are they inter­est­ed in read­ing and learn­ing about? What legal chal­lenges, pain points and prob­lems are they fac­ing? What are the lat­est and emerg­ing issues or trends that will affect your tar­get audi­ence? What con­tent for­mats (i.e. blogs, videos), chan­nels (i.e. Twit­ter, Face­book) and plat­forms (i.e. legal sites, com­mu­ni­ty forums) do they pre­fer to read con­tent and inter­act with your law firm?

By devel­op­ing a deep under­stand­ing of your tar­get audi­ence and their con­tent needs and pref­er­ences, you can more effec­tive­ly cre­ate con­tent that they actu­al­ly want, and pub­lish to the right chan­nels and plat­forms where your con­tent will actu­al­ly get seen by your tar­get audience.

Keep It Simple

Law is a com­plex top­ic, and there are many legal ter­mi­nolo­gies and jar­gons that may be dif­fi­cult for most peo­ple to under­stand. To avoid alien­at­ing your tar­get audi­ence, you want your con­tent to be acces­si­ble and approachable.

Write as if you’re speak­ing to a friend with­out a law back­ground. When deal­ing with a com­plex issue, try to use exam­ples and sto­ries to illus­trate the key points you’re making.

The last thing you want your con­tent to do is to drown your tar­get audi­ence in com­plex legalese and indus­try speak that they don’t understand.

So when cre­at­ing con­tent, write with your poten­tial clients in mind. The best legal con­tent mar­ket­ing sim­pli­fies a com­plex top­ic and engages poten­tial clients in a con­ver­sa­tion, not throw­ing a legal text­book or lec­ture at them.

Lead But Don’t Sell

It’s tempt­ing to pro­mote your ser­vices in your con­tent, but again that’s not what con­tent mar­ket­ing is meant to do. Your goal should be to estab­lish your law firm as a trust­ed resource and advi­sor to poten­tial clients, not push­ing your ser­vices to them.

That’s why Tip #2 is extreme­ly impor­tant. Once you have a clear under­stand­ing of the top­ics and issues most impor­tant to your tar­get audi­ence, you can cre­ate con­tent that address­es those needs and inter­ests with action­able infor­ma­tion that they can act on after read­ing your con­tent. To-do lists and check­lists are just some exam­ples of effec­tive action-ori­ent­ed con­tent for­mats you can use.

When you’re offer­ing mean­ing­ful, rel­e­vant and valu­able insights that your tar­get audi­ence is look­ing for, the adver­tis­ing will take care of itself through the knowl­edge and exper­tise you share.

Measure And Optimize Your Content Marketing Efforts

In Tip #1, we talked about defin­ing and doc­u­ment­ing the met­rics you’ll use to mea­sure your con­tent mar­ket­ing per­for­mance. This should include met­rics such as the num­ber of page views, web­site vis­its and social shares, as well as how often read­ers are con­vert­ing into leads and clients for your law firm.

You’ll want to know if your con­tent is dri­ving the desired action you want your poten­tial clients to take. And by reg­u­lar­ly track­ing and ana­lyz­ing your met­rics, you can bet­ter iden­ti­fy where you’re suc­ceed­ing with your con­tent mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy, and the areas you can improve on to opti­mize your legal con­tent mar­ket­ing efforts, to help dri­ve more qual­i­ty leads and con­vert clients into actu­al busi­ness and rev­enue for your law firm.

I hope these 5 tips will help you devel­op a suc­cess­ful con­tent mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy to grow your law firm.

SOURCE: Mar­ket­ing Insid­er Group