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Content marketing is one of the best ways to grow a law firm due to its inexpensiveness, its value to potential clients, and its prospects for long-term growth. But the practical execution of this strategy can be tricky. Not only do you have to target the right audience and consistently produce high-quality work, but you have to keep a close eye on your budget and results—and make changes on the fly to improve.
Thankfully, there are several strategies you can employ to improve your approach to content marketing.
Capitalize on Specific Topics
One of the best steps you can take is to write about the most specific topics you can. Feel free to have dedicated pages on broad subjects, like “personal injury,” but when you’re developing individual blog posts or more diverse internal pages, the more specific you are, the better. For example, you can focus on a specific area of practice, like cases related to mesothelioma and asbestos lung cancer.
Increasing the specificity of your work has two major effects:
- Improving audience relevance. Your readers will be more likely to connect with your brand if your content resonates with them. The more specific your content is, the more they’re going to connect with it. If it’s too vague or uninteresting, they’re going to seek out something more engaging.
- Limiting competition. Increasing the specificity of your work also limits the number of lawyers you’ll be competing with. Instead of trying to outrank and outshine every lawyer with a “personal injury” page, you can narrow your focus and your audience.
Understand Restrictions
The American Bar Association is strict when it comes to the professionalism and ethics of lawyer advertising, and content marketing is included in that. This should go without saying, but make sure you familiarize yourself with these standards before you write content for your prospective clients. If you mislead your audience, if you imply that you’re giving official legal advice, or if you break conventions for describing your firm, you could end up in hot water.
Keep Calls-to-Action (CTAs) as a Secondary Priority
It’s common to include at least one call-to-action (CTA) in each new piece of content you write for your law firm. For example, you might encourage your readers to reach out to your company for a free legal consultation. This is a great way to generate new leads, and it’s a generally advisable strategy. However, CTAs should be your secondary priority. Your first priority should be providing your audience with the highest-quality information possible.
If your content is thin, hard to understand, or vague, readers will see your CTA as a cheap attempt to get new clients, and they won’t think favorably of you. By contrast, if you offer great content, they’ll be much more likely to trust you when that CTA appears.
Write for a Specific Audience
You’ll get far better results if you tailor your content for specific audiences. This usually means creating sub-topics and potentially, entire sub-blogs to host your work. Depending on your intentions, you may also create custom landing pages for different segments of your audience. From there, you can let your readers naturally filter themselves by allowing them to choose different blog categories and/or search for topics on your blog, or filter them yourself with the help of different traffic generation strategies.
Boost the Visibility of Your Best Work
Hypothetically, the best content on the web should be self-sustaining; sooner or later, people will discover it, and if it’s good enough, they’ll share it with their friends, colleagues, and family members, helping it explode in popularity. In practice, these natural discoveries are rare.
When you write your best content, you’ll want to take matters into your own hands by promoting it. There are several ways to do this, including publishing your work on social media, building backlinks to it with offsite posts, and even paying for advertising.
Integrate Content Marketing With Other Strategies
Content marketing is a fine marketing strategy on its own, but it really shines in its synergies with other marketing strategies. If you want to get the most out of it, try integrating your content marketing with tactics like email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, and paid advertising. These related strategies tend to feed off each other’s momentum, and can help you build a more comprehensive web presence over time.
Content marketing isn’t a strategy that lawyers can get right immediately; instead, it requires an ongoing process of research, learning, and reevaluation. Keep an open mind, experiment with different tactics and approaches, and try to stick with the habits that seem to work best—while eliminating the tactics that didn’t seem to work out.
