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Chapter 2/6
Law Firm Marketing
8 min read
Content marketing is simple: It’s online material—like blogs, social media, videos, and podcasts—that teaches people about your firm and how you help.
And it’s a big deal. Law firm content marketing gets three times the leads from paid search. Small businesses, including small or solo law practices, with blogs get 126% more lead growth than those without.
However, content marketing isn’t just slapping a few blog posts on your page. To get the most out of content marketing, build your brand, engage prospective clients, and drive sales, you need more than activity.
You need a strategy.
Content marketing is the art of getting a clear message to your audience without overtly selling. The focus is on creating client-centered content that helps your audience solve their problems. It’s being a client’s advocate, helping them navigate through challenging moments, and becoming their trusted guide.
Effective law firm content marketing builds trust and authority in you and your law firm.
At the highest level, these steps include:
Content marketing is the process of using content to bring in fresh leads to your firm. Its purpose is to draw potential clients in, rather than outwardly pushing your brand, product, or service onto prospects in the hope of generating leads or clients.
Now that you know your ideal client, it’s time to understand what they are searching for online. After all, you should tailor content to fit their needs. Through basic keyword and topic research, you can curate enough content ideas to keep your content plan full for months to come.
A keyword is a term clients enter into search engines to find specific services. For example, if your potential client just got a DUI, they might search for “DUI lawyer [location].” Easy, right?
Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing these terms, creating a backbone for your content strategy.
To find relevant keywords for your content, follow these steps:
Ask yourself what questions or concerns your potential client may have involving each keyword. Create content that answers these questions. From a strategic standpoint, it’s best to create a spreadsheet for keywords and topics to easily view your keyword strategy.
And a bigger tip: Don’t use legalese. Your clients don’t know what an estate planning lawyer does. They do know their father-in-law needs to get his will written. So, focus on simple terms.
Keywords and SEO are techy-sounding phrases that strike fear in the heart of a lot of lawyers. You can master every archaic Latin law phrase in the book, but SEO makes you want to run away. Just think about this way: SEO just means making sure Google coughs up your website when your clients search for words (keywords) related to your firm.
It’s time to create your content with ideal client personas and keywords in your content marketing arsenal. Whether a blog post or a new website page, the content you create should be extremely valuable to your client persona and authoritative for your firm.
Types to consider include:
When we say valuable, we mean don’t just throw content up for the sake of having something up there. Make sure your content will a) draw in clients and b) draw in the type of clients you want.
It’s a no-brainer, but don’t mislead your clients. They’ll see right through covert or sleight-of-hand sales tactics on your site. You are an expert in your field. So, write what you know.
To create authoritative content, you must do so with honesty and integrity. As you create your content, make sure you remain 100% transparent. And remember to follow legal marketing ethics rules.
Although essential, high-quality content doesn’t depend on word count or the number of blog posts or pages you put out each month. Say what you need to say, and don’t forget to edit. One high-quality and informative blog post is much better than four useless, fluff-filled blog posts. The key is to focus on consistently providing quality, not quantity.
Besides being transparent and focused on quality, your content should also be:
Easy to digest. Make sure you use whitespace to combat reader’s fatigue for your clients. Keep paragraphs to 3-4 sentences and use 20-words or fewer sentences for easier readability. Use tools to check the readability scores of your content.
Actionable. Your clients should be able to act after consuming your content. For example, give your clients a set of steps to solve a problem. Your content should improve your client’s life in some way.
Accurate. Any sources you use or pull-quotes should be correct. When creating legal content, make sure the advice given is proper and safe for your clients.
Edit and proofread. Seems like a no-brainer, but one glaring typo could mean a client sees you as less authoritative than your competitor.
Content is a tool that helps drive potential clients to the center of your content marketing strategy: your website and, even better, your email and phone number to contact you. To help drive traffic to your website, you need to distribute your content to the appropriate channels and promote it to the right people.
Distribution and promotion are two different things. Distribution involves the process of linking to your content in channels such as social media and email to share with others. Promotion is your strategy’s paid elements, such as paying for a Facebook ad.
To distribute your content, you have many different options. When choosing which option works best, consider things from your client persona’s point of view: where do they hang out online?
Content promotion often generates more views faster than distribution, although it does come at a cost. Promotion might include (and we go more in-depth about each of these later):
After you’ve promoted your content on social media, neighborhood groups, or online forums, it’s time to move visitors down your marketing funnel. As they come to your website, you want to convert them from interested, casual readers to qualified leads for your firm.
This means creating calls-to-action throughout your website using content, like:
Landing pages. If you purchase a paid ad for your content, it needs to go somewhere. Landing pages capture clicks from paid ads. Plus, Google smiles upon them, seeing them as indicators of relevance. A landing page can offer the content you created in exchange for their contact information.
Page-by-page calls-to-action. Regardless of how your potential client finds you, make sure each page on your website has a call-to-action. Format your CTAs to stand out from the rest of your content. Be direct and tell your readers exactly what you want them to do. For example, “Call us to schedule a consult,” or “Download our free guide.”
Lead magnets. A content upgrade is bonus content visitors can download in exchange for their email address (or other contact information). Upgrades include checklists, one-sheets, whitepapers, infographics, webinars, and even eBooks.
Last, as with all advertising, don’t forget to measure your clicks and leads. A strategy isn’t a strategy without a metric.
Next, in Chapter 4, let’s drill down into paid advertising.
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