Almost ten years ago, the legal field became saturated. This saturation lead to an increase in competition between law firms for better clients and recruits. Ten years later, we are faced with the same problems but now have a whole new set of modern solutions.
Marketing strategies have modified immensely over the years. Today, a few print ads, billboards and TV commercials with the same mundane script cannot suffice to market your law firm.
In this digital era, aside from positive referrals, taking your marketing online is imperative to keep you in the game. Between Facebook, Online reviews, and content marketing, there are multiple options to consider to find clients.
Creating relevant and premium content can be the key to the success of your law firm’s marketing efforts. Law content marketing is one of the best ways you can present your ideas in front of your target audience, gain trust and build long-lasting affiliations with your prospects. Also, content marketing costs less and generates three times as many leads as outbound marketing strategies.
So, whether you’re creating your firm’s content marketing strategy for the first time or you’re reconsidering the issue, here are a few tried and tested tips you should keep in mind regarding your law firm’s content marketing.
You Need to Know Where Are You Starting From
If you’re looking to create your firm’s content marketing strategy from scratch or want to revise its existing plan, you have to know your starting point.
The first step in your content marketing strategy should be a professional, robust website. Even if you already have a website for your law firm, web design practises are constantly evolving making more user-friendly experiences possible. Hire a graphic designer or professional web developer to design you a website that is an honest representation of your law firm and what it offers.
Stress your advantage or specialization throughout your website whilst including your brand colours.
Statistically speaking, 75% of clients judge the quality of a law firm and the capabilities of its attorneys by the appearance of their website.
A sleek, user-friendly website, however, doesn’t serve its purpose if it is not findable on search engines, and the content posted (including information, pictures, videos and reviews) are not relevant to your potential clients.
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You Need to Know the Fundamentals of SEO
It’s important to learn about the basics of SEO to make your website show higher in search engines like Google. To be more accessible, it is important to be more visible to potential prospects and recruits.
There are many SEO audit tools available online, or you can also hire a professional to perform an audit. However, you must have a clear understanding of the essentials, including link building, meta titles/descriptions, keyword-focused writing, etc.
Choose keywords in accordance with your target audience. Use key phrases that represent your practice, for example, ‘law attorney for low-income family’, ‘immigration solicitors’, ‘law attorney for child custody’, etc. Having a page for each of these key phrases will help you convey relevant information, while also making your site appear in search results for them.
Local SEO is also important so that you appear in search results for your local service area. Register (for free) with Google My Business so that you are more accessible. Optimize all your webpages by including your firm’s name, address and phone number. Put in photos (including your logo) and add a link to your website. The more information you add the better
Choose Your Marketing Channels Carefully
For your content marketing strategy to work, you should try to choose the most effective marketing channels that align with your law firm’s objectives and goals.
There are many options available, including paid ads, SMS/Email marketing, and Social Media that can work in collaboration with your personalized content marketing strategy.
It is always better to choose those channels that are directly or indirectly related to your audience. For example, your practice specializes in business, serving industrial and manufacturing clients. Manufacturing executives may be more inclined to read web articles on engineering forums than to visit social media, which makes blogging a better channel choice. LinkedIn is also an excellent place to find leads as you can run ads targeting specific job titles and industries.
Focus on Data-Driven Content
Practising law is all about employing facts, logic and reasoning. Therefore, it is only sensible that law firms should embrace the benefits of data analytics!
When it comes to getting the most from your marketing plan, it is always helpful to make crucial decisions in accordance with data. It helps to target your desired client base, create content specific to the services your law firm offers, and monitor the effectiveness of your content and marketing campaigns. Fortunately, there are more tools available than ever to help marketers make well-informed data-influenced decisions.
As a start, your website should have Google Analytics on it so that you can monitor the effectiveness of different ad campaigns. You can also use Google Trends to find popular searches (and, therefore, levels of interest) in different countries and areas.
Identify Your Target Audience
Make sure you accurately identify your target audience so that you can create relevant content. To do this, you have to conduct in-depth market research, including demographics you’re targeting.
Are you targeting business people and executives who will prefer formal content? Or are your targeting millennials who want to file a lawsuit relating to cybercrime?
It is important to be aware of what your firm is being approached for mostly. For example, if the majority approaching you are middleaged people fighting for child custody, they are less likely to go on Instagram or appreciate an informal tone.
Knowing who you’re talking to is one of the most important steps in the process of content marketing. Notably, this will also affect the tone and style of your content.
Visual-Rich Content is the Future
Ask yourself if you retain more from reading or watching a video? Studies have shown that it’s almost always the latter.
Interestingly, search engines also pay attention to the visuals in your content. You can easily optimize images and videos embedded in your posts with SEO-driven captions and descriptions (eg use the same keyphrases you identified for your content marketing).
Visual-rich content could be in the form of images, infographics, illustrations, pull quotes, and videos. Infographics and illustrations can be used to explain complex legal processes to the public via flowcharts and animations. People really respond well to such content, compared to lengthy blocks of text.
Legibility also has a role to play in the aesthetic value of your content. All in all, relevant, personalized, information with appropriate visual content will leave a lasting impact on your readers.
Brainstorm
Brainstorming different ideas and topics could be a hurdle when you want to consistently and routinely publish content related to your niche. Everyone runs out of ideas eventually.
Competitive analysis is one of the ways you can get new ideas for your upcoming posts. You can also take a hint from your clients’ most common legal issues. For example, when the ‘Me Too’ movement was on the rise, law firms started to talk more against sexual and domestic abuse.
Once you know how to generate unique topics, you should invest some time in creating a content calendar for your firm (an Excel sheet with a list of key dates is a great way to get started). Planning what you are going to write so that it coincides with key dates (or common lulls in business) takes most of the stress out of ongoing content creation.
Opt for a Cross Channel Marketing Approach
To make a positive impression and excel at marketing, you need a powerful, interconnected approach that brings relevant content together seamlessly and presents it to your target audience where and how they want it. This is where cross channel marketing comes in.
In cross channel marketing, your marketing channels like emails, blog posts, etc. operate independently and amplify each other’s effects. For example, if a lead reads a blog post you wrote about why is it important to file a lawsuit against domestic abuse, the marketing email they later receive might provide a customer testimonial from someone who overcame that same issue by availing your services.
To get the most out of your law content marketing plan, you should consider the COPE method – Create Once, Publish Everywhere. This means turning a blog post into an email, and a series of tweets, or even an infographic and a video so you can post them on other channels. Once you’ve made a great piece of content, make sure you get the most out of it.
You don’t need to be on every channel, but choosing a few channels that are relevant to you, and then putting your content into the form most relevant for each is a great way of maximising the ROI of your content marketing.
Final Words
It is important for law firms to adopt marketing strategies that are pertinent to their services and in accordance with present trends and customer requirements.
It takes a great deal of effort and diligence to improve and upscale your content marketing strategy, but with patience and continuous improvement, you will see a huge difference over time.
We hope this post has answered some of your queries related to law content marketing.