The Content Marketing Tips in this article are designed help to achieve a base level of performance with your content marketing strategy.
Marketing in the legal profession is competitive. Most traditional channels are now saturated, leading to a high cost to capture attention, even in small markets. It’s essential to diversify your marketing efforts and leverage content marketing tools to generate large returns on even modest investments.
In this article, we’ll look at several Content Marketing Tips designed for lawyers. The purpose is to help or even replace those $100/click paid search campaigns, high dollar TV and radio ads, and traditional print marketing. The last thing you want is to have diminishing returns over time.
Let’s begin with a plan!
Effective content marketing for Lawyers starts with a plan
To target your ideal audience, generate traffic, and build a long-term funnel that captures new leads from existing content, you need a plan. An effective content marketing plan consists of five key elements.
5-step content marketing plan
- A clear understanding of your audience – Who are you reaching out to? What are their primary pain points? What kind of decision-making ability do they have? The Content Marketing Tips that work best vary significantly if you target small business owners vs. individuals with personal injury claims.
- A fully optimized site – Your website is the foundation of your content marketing efforts. It should be mobile-friendly, optimized for search engine performance, and has a clear message for your target audience.
- A funnel to leverage content created – A marketing funnel defines the most valuable pieces of information you can provide to your target audience at different stages of the decision-making process. The document or video someone will consume is different if they start looking for legal help instead of spending weeks researching their options.
- High-quality content that provides value to your audience – The content needs to be unique. There are millions of content pages on the Internet from law firms hoping to cash in on these tactics. Yours needs to stand out from the competition. It should be lengthy, detailed, and action-oriented. Consider other media, such as videos, webinars, infographics, or even a podcast. They will supplement traditional text media.
- Promotion and distribution of your content to the right people – You should promote your content. An effective content marketing campaign allocates at least 50% of the overall effort to distribute and promote content to ensure it reaches the right people.
These five steps form the framework of a useful digital content strategy. It will help you build a lasting relationship with your audience and capture new leads for your business.
Content marketing tips to get the most from your efforts
Now, what exactly should you be building for your content marketing campaigns? Here are some tips for how to build a strong piece of content that resonates with your audience.
1. Write for your audience, not your profession
This applies in almost every industry, but especially in the legal field. Your audience does not consist of lawyers. They don’t know the difference between personal jurisdiction and in rem jurisdiction. Your audience knows that they have a problem requiring legal help.
One of the trickiest elements of content marketing is purifying what you know into actionable information. Why? So it’s presentable in layman’s terms to people who are starting to research potential solutions.
Think of it this way: no one wants to know how the sausage is made. They want to know if it’s safe, healthy and going to fill their stomach. Can you solve the problem your audience is having? If so, what does that look like for them? It requires someone who can write in plain English about complex topics in simple terms and engage with an audience across that divide.
2. Keep everything solution-oriented
Like the first tip above, ensure your content remains action-oriented. Don’t talk about problems without presenting solutions to those problems.
When someone performs a Google search, they are in one of two states most of the time. They are either (1) researching to educate themselves on a topic they know little or nothing about, or (2) evaluating their options to solve a problem based on previous research.
Content marketing is designed to address two mental states. It’s either educating prospects with crucial information and answering additional questions or providing a clear outline of how it will help them with a particular issue. Raw info without context, blanket marketing statements about your past cases, or articles about recent news stories don’t do this.
3. Produce robust, in-depth content
Recently, a search for almost any legal question in Google would turn up multiple pages of short, cookie-cutter content that read almost the same as a thousand other pages. In other words, basic information about who to call if you’re in an accident or how to find a good divorce attorney.
Google has taken many steps by moving beyond quantitative measures like article length or keyword density. Their algorithms are now trained to evaluate the content on its merits. Google’s official stance is websites that attempt to artificially improve “their pages’ ranking and attract visitors by creating pages with many words but little or no authentic content,” will not be rewarded for those efforts.
The result is a higher bar for success. To ensure the content people find when they search for legal support is relevant to their search and not a quick SEO hit, search results are growing more selective about the content that ranks on Google search. What you write needs to be in-depth and actionable. Short articles with a bunch of keywords won’t get the job done anymore. Blogs should be longer than five-hundred words, with real advice and link to relevant supplemental content.
Getting the most from your content marketing
The Content Marketing Tips in this article are designed help to achieve a base level of performance with your content marketing strategy. By ensuring your audience is clear, and your content is crafted to provide value to readers and viewers, you can start to compete with the big guys. You can bypass expensive outbound campaign options for tactics that work. Also, your law firm or practice will have a competitive advantage when it has a high-performing website.
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