Introduction
Content marketing for lawyers is a type of digital marketing. It plays a key role for any law firm in sharing its expertise with the world. It involves using content to generate brand awareness, attract organic traffic and convert visitors into clients. As a result, it grows your business both online and offline. Content marketing for lawyers can take on many forms and generate many types of results for businesses. For example, it can utilize blog posts, articles, videos, social media posts and more.
Successful content marketing should fulfill at least one or all of the following goals to be effective. It should:
- Increase brand awareness
- Establish thought leadership and expertise
- Create an online community
- Generate leads and ultimately, sales or new clients.
Read below how to create your own effective content marketing strategy for 2021.
Identify Your Main Objective
Content can serve a variety of purposes – from attracting website visitors to increasing engagement on social media to growing your email list. Before creating content, consider your primary objective so you’re prepared to create content that helps you accomplish this goal. Accordingly, different types of content work to generate different results. Therefore, it’s more effective to identify your main objective(s) from the very beginning. For a start, answer these questions. Do you want to:
- Attract website visitors?
- Grow your email list?
- Increase social media engagement?
- Increase your law firm’s authority online?
- Run a PR campaign?
- Improve your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy?
- Turn visitors into leads?
- Attract backlinks?
Afterward, consider these before creating your content marketing strategy. As a result, you create the right kind of content to achieve your goals.
Find relevant topics
The idea behind law firm content marketing is to publish content that will provide useful information to potential consumers. This implies developing content that will stay relevant for a long time. In other words- providing your audience with information that will always be useful and valuable.
When people have legal questions, one of the first places they look is online. If you have a piece of content that addresses the common questions that people ask, this can be a good way to attract potential clients to your firm.
When searching for content ideas, think about the types of cases you handle. What types of questions do prospective clients usually ask? What information would be useful to these clients? For example, someone involved in a car accident would probably want to know if he needs a lawyer.
Another way to search for topics is to develop audience personas. With some areas of practice, you might find that certain types of clients have many things in common. The more you know about your intended audience, the more likely you’ll be to choose topics and produce content that is relevant to them.
Conduct SEO Keyword Research
Optimize your online content for search engines. Optimized content will have a better chance of ranking in the search results for relevant keywords. In other words, clients will more likely find your law firm when looking for answers to their legal questions.
One of the most important parts of search engine optimization (SEO) is finding the right keywords. There are certain keywords and phrases for every topic that people may use when they search the subject. By using these keywords within your content, you can make your articles and pages easier to find.
For example, are your clients searching for a “personal injury lawyer” or “car accident attorney”? Identify keywords your target audience is searching for. Look for keywords related to your service area and the legal services you offer.
Once you have a list of keywords, decide whether they are best suited for blog posts or web pages. A keyword like ”Denver family law” would be suited to a service page, whereas “How to file for a divorce in Denver” best fits a blog post. Furthermore, use keyword research tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs to find keywords to you on your web pages or in your blog posts.
Update and republish
To ensure your content continues to attract visitors, keep it up-to-date. Regularly review your content on a yearly schedule or even every six months and make corrections as needed. For example:
- Replace any references to old news articles with more up-to-date, relevant events. For example, if a study on a subject was released four years ago, check whether there’s a more recent version.
- Test all links to make sure they still work and haven’t been redirected to a piece of content that’s now irrelevant.
- Keep an eye out for changes that might affect your content. For example, if a law changes, update all posts this change affected accordingly.
Finally, republish your blog posts, YouTube videos and promote the content as you would have when it first went out. Republishing your updated content can provide plenty of value to your potential clients.
Repurpose your content
Many of the world’s leading marketers make repurposing content a part of their strategies. When you repurpose content, you get more out of the time and effort that went into developing the original piece. Here’s what repurposing content might look like:
- Take written content, such as blog posts and turn these pieces into video content or visual content such as infographics.
- Take a video and write a blog post based on the subject matter in the video.
- You could take short facts and quotes from articles and turn them into posts for your social media accounts.
- You could take old blog posts and repurpose them as newsletters to send out as part of an email campaign.
With an effective content marketing strategy, you can establish your law firm as a trusted source of information. As a result, people will turn to you when they need to learn about your area of expertise. This can raise the profile of your business, resulting in more clients contacting your firm when they need advice.
Research Your Competitors’ Content
Research your competitors’ content strategies to see what keywords they are targeting and what content they’re posting on social media. Use the same keyword research tools as above (SEMRush and Ahrefs) to search for their domain names and see what keywords they are ranking for. This can be a great way to find keywords you should be targeting on your own site.
Collect feedback
Ask your audience what topics they’re interested in. Furthermore, what questions do they have about the services you offer or the legal process in general? You can do this by sending out an anonymous survey on social media or a campaign to your email subscribers. Afterward, turn these questions into blog posts and create a Frequently Asked Questions page on your website.
The best way to generate fresh, engaging content ideas is to ask your audience what they want to read. Use Google Forms to create a survey to reach your readers and past clients. Include questions like:
- What questions do you have about [legal topic] (e.g., divorce)?
- What are the three biggest struggles you have when it comes to [legal issue]?
- Where do you go to find law-related content online?
- What kind of content would you like to see on a website?
Their answers to these questions will help you generate some interesting content ideas. Afterward, include these topics into your law firm’s new and improved content strategy.
Establish a Content Schedule
Your law firm’s content marketing strategy is more effective when you are publishing, posting and marketing your content on a regular basis. Project management tools like Asana and Monday can help you stay on schedule and organize your content details. They can also ensure that you’re distributing your content across multiple channels.
Focus on Lead Generation
When publishing and sharing your content, consider what actions you want users to take. Do you want them to download an e-book? Give you a call? Fill out a form? Make this clear so you can generate as many leads as possible. For example:
- Include contact forms on the service pages of your website
- Add downloadable e-books and infographics to your blog posts in exchange for their email address
- Include calls-to-action on your social media posts to encourage followers to contact you
- Add your phone number to your web pages to make it easy for prospects to reach you
- Promote your email newsletters to collect more email addresses
- Create downloadable “lead magnet” content in exchange for their contact information
Follow Up with Prospects
One of the important steps of content marketing for lawyers is following up with your prospects. When you collect information from prospects, record this information and outline a process for follow-up. This can involve having an automated email campaign or following up with the prospect directly. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools can help you keep your lead information organized, check follow-up status, send client documents and much more. Use these to ensure that you’re following up with every lead and aren’t missing out on new client opportunities.
Create Linkable Assets
A linkable asset is a type of content that works to attract backlinks to your website. Links from high-quality sites can improve your own site’s SEO, increasing your rankings and drawing in new website visitors. There are many types of linkable assets you can create. For example, e-books, guest articles, interviews, webinars and more. The great news is that your content can serve many purposes at once. For instance, publish an SEO-friendly blog post that generates traffic, attracts backlinks and increases engagement on social media. As a result, it will convert readers into clients.
Research Your Target Audience
Conduct market research to understand what your target audience wants, how they search, and what topics they are interested in. Here are a few questions you can ask:
- What is your #1 legal struggle at the moment?
- Which resources have you looked into to help you overcome this struggle?
- What issues do you have with the resources/ solutions you came across?
- Which traits are you looking for in an X lawyer?
- What is your #1 goal when it comes to overcoming your legal issue?
- What topics would you like to learn more about?
Users’ answers to these questions will help guide your brand narrative. In addition, you can come up with thought-provoking content ideas you know your audience will be interested in. As a result, it will turn passive website visitors into potential clients.
Establish a Brand Identity and Narrative
Establish strong brand identity and narrative that clearly defines what your law firm is about. It will affirm the types of clients you work with, how you work, your company values, your mission statement and what kinds of services you offer.
Be sure to create a brand statement that states:
- Who your target audience is
- What services does your law firm offer
- How you work and deliver services
- Your company values
- How do you approach client support
- Your mission statement
- Your brand voice, style, brand tone, etc.
- Anything else your team should know when it comes to your brand content
This brand identity statement can take the form of an internal document that you, your team, and any contracts you hire can refer to when creating new content. That way, all your content marketing will align with your brand identity.
Establish a Content Distribution Plan
While SEO blog content can work to attract organic traffic, you should also have a distribution plan to get your content noticed on other channels. Software like Buffer can work to push your content out to social media platforms. You can share your content on Facebook, Linked In, Instagram, Twitter, or any other social site.
You can also reshare your content to your email list, repurpose it as a video, or turn it into another type of content asset. It helps to schedule your content distribution efforts so you stay consistent. This will allow you to drive views, attract website visitors, and, ideally, land new clients on a regular basis.
Experiment with Mixed Media
Content marketing for lawyers can involve a variety of mediums. It’s fun and effective to experiment with mixed media to see what works best with your audience. Here are some different ways to repurpose your content:
- E-books
- Podcast episodes
- Email campaigns
- Newsletters
- Downloadable documents/ PDFs
- Webinars
- Case studies
- Infographics
Try some of these out, add them to your content distribution plan, and see how your audience responds. Take note of the media types that generate the best results so you can be sure to create more of these in the future.
Measure Content Marketing Results
The goal of content marketing for lawyers is to generate tangible results for your business. Therefore, monitoring the progress of your content closely should be a part of your marketing strategy. Use Google Analytics to track website traffic, traffic sources, goal completions, website bounce rate and more. These will tell you whether users are converting on your site and where they are coming from.
Most social media sites have their own performance metrics regarding engagement, likes, clicks, etc. These will show you how users are interacting with your social media content. Finally, your email management system should be able to track open rates, clicks and more to tell you how your email content is performing. Use these insights to inform and improve your future content marketing for lawyers.
Conclusion
With the right planning and tools, you can create quality content that moves your law firm forward. The more content you create, the more your skills will improve. As a result, you will turn passive visitors into new clients. In addition, you can create a program that will generate leads and new clients in a more effective way than paid advertising. For a start, content marketing for lawyers is something you can do yourself with some dedicated time. However, there are also professionals who can help your law firm create a hugely successful content marketing program.