Content Marketing is becoming a staple part of every legal marketing strategy. More firms than ever are relying on content marketing and adapting their strategies in order to keep up with the quickly changing digital landscape. Even though content marketing is an integral part of digital marketing, it is oftentimes dismissed and requires a lot of time and effort to maintain.
In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of content marketing and why you should start investing in this powerful and cost-effective tool.
What is Content Marketing
Content marketing is a marketing strategy that is used to promote and engage with your target audience and can be viewed as anything from videos, podcasts, articles and case studies. This content would normally be stored on your website, which promotes visitors to your page so you can gain trust, reputation and engagement with your visitors.
What Are Some Benefits of Content Marketing
Increases your Social Media engagement
Now that you have valuable information and content on your website, using social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn to share your content is a great way to not only get visitors to your website but also to promote your social channels. This will increase your follower base, and you’ll be able to connect and give more opportunities for people to reach out to you.
Build reputation, trust and authenticity
By creating valuable, relevant content on a frequent basis, you’re able to build trust with your visitors and current paying clients. It also gives insight into your brand image and reputation and allows them to understand your services and area of practice. Because of this, it is important to keep your content’s language authentic and true to your firm’s values and area of expertise.
Use your content to educate your potential clients
A majority of the time, people seek legal advice online when they are looking for information, especially when it’s regarding legal matters. Ensure that your website, content and strategy aligns with the firm so that you are able to position yourself as experts in the field. By educating your potential clients, you’re able to find more qualified leads and your paying clients will gain more information about your firm. This is a great way for your current clients to share information with others through word-of-mouth as well.
How to Build a Content Marketing Plan
If you’re just starting out, or if you’d like to start adding content to your website in order to improve your online presence, building a content marketing plan is a good place to start.
Here’s what you should consider when building a Content Strategy Plan:
Create ambitious and achievable standards and goals
Before creating any content, you need to know who your target audience is and how you’d like to reach them. What message do you want to convey to your visitors and what are the purposes of this information? First and foremost, you should clearly define your content by creating goals around your company’s values and position.
Determine How and What Measurables You’d Like to Track
Establish Key Performance Indicators. If you’ve dabbled in legal marketing, you’ll know what KPIs are. KPIs are measurable values that are used to determine whether you have successfully or unsuccessfully met your goals. Certain metrics may help with your performance tracking relating to content marketing, such as:
- Measuring how many people sign up to your email list to get more information about your firm
- Measuring how many new unique visitors arrive at your website
- Measure where your content is positioned on search engines
- Measure how much revenue has been obtained from visitors finding your content
- Measure how many readers you have, and the number of mentions, shares or comments
Know Who You Are Targeting
Who do you want your content to target? It’s important to understand who your visitors are (age, gender, education, income, demographic, etc). From there, you can tailor specific content to those individuals to increase engagement and visitors. Using Google Analytics is a good place to start, which gives you complete information about the users on your site and helps to track performance metrics.
Assess What You Have Already Posted
If you’ve never tried content marketing, you can skip this step. However, it’s important to go through your previous content to see what works and what hasn’t. Have your previous content helped in growing your firm or have they aided in supporting your firm’s goals and objectives? Whether they’re videos, podcasts or case studies, it’s good to evaluate what will benefit your firm the most as content marketing, when done in-house, can eat up a lot of time.
Create a Content Marketing Calendar
Many times, attorneys will try to write their own content but let it slip through the cracks because they don’t have enough time to complete an article or a case study. Writing and creating content is not an easy feat and takes a lot of time, effort and dedication. It’s good to take some time to evaluate whether it is worth creating content in-house or whether an external legal marketing agency can be of use. If you plan on bringing content in-house, then it’s important to set time out of your busy schedule to achieve these goals. Establish topics beforehand and give due dates so that you maintain and steady and consistent flow of content going through your website.
Take Advantage of Social Media and Email Marketing
Once you have new content flowing to your website, it’s time to promote them. You won’t get the results you’re looking for if they’re just placed there. Make sure you share each piece of content on your social media and email marketing campaigns. Add hashtags, respond to comments and engage with your visitors.
Measure Your Results and Ongoing Performance
Finally, measure your performance! Whether it’s through social analytic tools or Google Analytics, it’s important to track your performance in order to evaluate your success through content marketing. By tracking these reports, you’ll be more aware of your KPIs and engagement. Tools such as SEMRush can help you assess these KPI measurables and you’ll be able to track the number of new email signups using reporting software from your email marketing program.
Would You like Content Marketing Support for Your Law Firm?
Established in 2006, Soulpepper Legal Marketing has helped hundreds of law firms, both small and large achieve their business goals and potential. If you are interested in learning more about Legal Marketing and how Soulpepper can help with your firm’s growth plan, please fill out this survey.
