In recent years, lawyers have realized the importance of marketing their law firms digitally. Many attorneys have now adopted the use of SEO and PPC marketing to put their law firms amongst the first results on SERP (search engine results page). The use of content marketing combined with these other marketing strategies can never be overemphasized. There is need to contribute to the lives of your audience and ultimately tell them about your services through the use of blog posts, social media posts, videos amongst others, as these are what brings your clients closer to you.
Discussing issues affecting your target audience and how their problems can be resolved through quality content goes a long way in building client-attorney relationship. Content marketing will only work when valuable content are distributed regularly and consistently. These contents must be relevant and valuable as search engines have a system for checking the relevance of contents before ranking them.
Carrying out content marketing as a lawyer
1. Your content should add value without being complex
Law being a professional field has a lot of complex jargon that you feel may impress your potential clients when you use them but this is not always true.
How well you can break down complex aspects of the law to your readers will go a long way in building their trust in you that you can make things simple for them when they hire you. Think about topics that pose a lot of questions to individuals within your target audience and throw light on such topics. Write as if you are discussing with a friend. When you answer their questions and offer insights into the issues they face, you are building a relationship. But do not assume for a minute that by resolving some of their confusions through your content that they may end up not finding any need to hire you. In fact, it so builds their trust in you that whenever they have any legal case where you are specialized, you are the first attorney on their radar.
2. Involve your lawyers
In your content marketing campaign, the content you publish should not only be available on your law firm’s website but your attorneys’ individual social media pages. Also, they should be involved in the content creation process as their insight into legal cases they have handled will be of immense relevance to your audience.
3. Define your content marketing strategy
A study revealed that more than half of the most successful advertisers maps out and document their content marketing strategy. But less than15% of lawyers practice this. Content marketing strategy should clearly define your goals, target audience, type of content, publishing timeline, and a system for measuring the outcome of your efforts.
Without a documented content marketing strategy, how is it possible to determine if your efforts are well synchronized with your primary goal or if they are yielding any results?
4. Have a metric system in place to evaluate your outcome
As earlier discussed, your substantiated strategy should include a measuring system for evaluating the outcome of your content marketing efforts. You should create an algorithm that will calculate and display the number of page clicks and visits, and their conversion rate. By tracking your outcome, you are better positioned to detect what you are doing right or wrong, and where there is need for improvement.
5. Get into the minds of your intended viewers
Before publishing content, you have to determine what legal issues most interest your target audience. What are the latest trending issues that affect them? What questions are they asking? Where do they go to get their answers? You then have to optimize your content to target these points. Post content on whatever platform your target audience prefers to get their answers from. That way, you get noticed by the right persons who actually want to read what you are providing.
6. Enlighten your viewers without directly advertising your services
It should be clearly understood that the objective of content marketing is never to put the services of your law firm at the forefront of your content but your audience. Content marketing is never to sell your services but build long-term relationship with your audience by giving them insight into complex legal topics. Answer complex frequently asked legal questions peculiar to your target audience and offer solutions to issues.
Through this medium, you are building your reputation as a trusted legal advisor and when they need an attorney, you are the first go-to on their minds.
