7 Content Marketing Strategies for Law Firms

Why Content Marketing Is Essential for a Law Firm Success: 7 Strategies for Growth

By Tetiana Artomova SEO marketing for lawyers 0 Comments

The legal industry is highly competitive, and law firms that implement an effective marketing strategy will stay relevant and succeed in such a market. That’s where content marketing comes in.

Not only does great content bring new leads and increase social shares, but it also helps you generate more traffic, and ultimately boost your revenue.

Sadly, less than half of all law firms (47%) overall have a marketing budget. On the contrary, law firms that implement digital marketing report having gotten more clients for their efforts.

Perhaps you’re wondering:

If you’re creating the right content
What’s the ROI of your content?
How can you be sure you’re creating content that clients actually want?

This post shares the most effective content marketing strategies for law firms and how to measure your content marketing results.

What Is Content Marketing for Law Firms?

Content marketing for law firms is a strategic marketing approach that’s focused on building brand awareness by creating shareable, consistent, and relevant content to attract and retain a target audience.

It’s an entity that cultivates an awareness about the industry and services offered. It’s engaging and educating your clients and prospective clients by publishing educational and informative content.

Law firm content marketing is a way to connect with the local community and generate leads by providing valuable advice and beneficial insights. Content can be distributed via blogs, video, social media, newsletters, and emails to capture your target audience, highlight your expertise and successes, and ultimately, grow your client base.

Benefits of Law Firm Content Marketing

But that’s not all. Content marketing can do so much more for your business growth and reputation:

Build brand awareness. Content marketing exposes your existence to potential clients. Brand-building awareness helps you extend your customer reach, and publishing content tailored to a specific audience gives the best impressions.
SEO-focused content drives organic traffic. Organic traffic means users who find their way into your website organically. That is, you don’t spend a dollar to attract them to your doorstep as you’d with paid ad strategy. A content marketing strategy that takes advantage of SEO best practices earns you organic traffic by meeting the requirements of major search engine algorithms.
Increases your blog’s/website’s authority. By optimizing your content, you get better SERP positioning, meaning your page appears at the top or closer to the top of a search engine’s results page. The higher you rank, the more authoritative you appear.
Improves lead generation by positioning you as an expert in your field. The more clients become familiar with your brand, the more trust you build and the more traffic you attract. At the same time, you generate more leads since more and more people become interested in your expert legal counsel. In addition, by sharing content about legal matters, you communicate your competence, trustworthiness, and value to people who might need your services.

7 Best Content Marketing Strategies for Law Firms

Content marketing is valuable for businesses that want to build brand awareness and expand their reach. That said, you’ll need a strategic approach to reach the right audience, entice, and convert them into paying customers.

Here are the 7 best content marketing strategies you can implement to generate more traffic and leads for your law firm.

1. Understand your audience

Before you start creating content for your audience, you need to understand who your target audience is. What motivates them? What challenges are they facing? What kind of services are they looking for to solve those issues?

A comprehensive understanding of your targets’ needs puts you in a better position to market yourself to them.

The best way to know your target clients is to create a “buyer persona”. This means creating a semi-fictionalized depiction of what your primary client looks like. When creating a buyer persona, think about:

Their demographics (age, gender, location)
Goals (what is your target audience trying to achieve?)
Background (what do your prospects do for a living?)
What are their main challenges and pain points?

Write down each persona with bullet points on how you will handle their issues and pain points.

There are several ways to find your target clients:

Look at your current client base – chances are, your target audience looks exactly the same.
Conduct surveys, either with your current clients or the public at large.
Analyze your competitor’s target audience – things like the keywords they use, who their content is aimed at, and who follows them on social media – and target the same audience.
Utilize Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and so on to see who is already looking at your content (if you’ve already published).

2. Keyword research

After researching your audience, the next step is SEO keyword research. You want to create content that’s optimized for ranking in search engines. Keywords and keyword phrases research tell you exactly what terms customers use to find law firms like yours in Google and other search engines.

The bad news is that legal keywords are among the most expensive. That means it’s almost impossible to occupy the top ranking using the most popular search terms. Fortunately, knowing your target personas allows you to identify the main questions they need answers to. You’ll also be aware of their stage in the sales funnel and match your keyword research to their user intent.

Therefore, create a list of keywords you want to target on your website and then determine the best content assets to use them.

3. Topics research

The list of keywords will guide you on the topics you need to cover. Looking at the questions your clients are asking will inform your content and content types. Some great sources to find ideas for your content include:

Reviews. Reviews tell you what the client’s issues are, what their pain points were, and what they liked and disliked about a competitor firm.
Social media inquiries. Create a record of the questions you receive and the answers you provide.
Reddit, Quora, and local forums. A platform like Quora or Reddit allows you to search for your practice areas and collate the questions you can answer. These questions will help you brainstorm ideas for your content.
Check the “People also ask” section on the search results page for useful content ideas.

4. Scope out the competition

You don’t need to do everything from scratch. One effective content marketing strategy involves ‘spying’ on your competitors to see what works well for them and how you can do it better.

You can check out the competition by:

Looking at their home page meta description to see how they position themselves in search results.
Following them on social media and checking posts that get the most engagement. Pay attention to comments, testimonials, and reviews. This will give you ideas of content that have the most impact.
Download their guides and eBooks to see what your competitors think customers value the most. This will give you a direction on how to approach your content marketing.
Subscribe to their newsletter and blog to keep tabs on their digital marketing campaigns and get ideas of content types they share.
Use tools like SEMrush’s Organic Research to take a sneak peek at the articles that are performing well for your competitors and find content gaps for your blog.

Keep in mind that you may not share the same target audience with your competitor. Therefore, prioritize the insights you gained from your market research when checking out the competition.

5. Optimize local SEO

To increase the visibility and organic search rankings for your law practice business, you need to focus on local SEO. Create informational content that offers clients answers to questions they might be having. On the same note, create foundational content for your local business that connects you to potential clients looking for legal services in your region.

For example, the keyword “personal injury attorney” is going to be very difficult to rank for. But when you specify that it’s “Sussex County personal injury attorney”, it becomes easier to rank highly on Google.

Therefore:

Create content for each location where your law firm is
Create content for each practice area

6. Create a blogging schedule

Consistency is the name of the game with content marketing. You want to work with a blogging schedule that will guide you on the frequency of content publishing. A project management tool like Asana will help you schedule your post assignments. Alternatively, you can use Google Calendar or Google Sheets to organize your topics and keywords.

Remember, you don’t need to be churning out a blog post every day. You can post a blog weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. The most important thing is to ensure each piece of content you create is relevant and of high quality.

7. Optimize (services) landing pages

To ensure conversions, you need to create detailed landing pages optimized for SEO. Your landing pages should be appealing to your target clients. It’s where you get to list the services you offer so interested customers searching for a specific service will find it on your website.

In addition, tell clients what they stand to gain for choosing your firm. Include compelling CTAs to entice prospects to contact you.

How to Measure Content Marketing Results

Simply put, what you don’t measure can’t be managed. Tracking your content marketing results enables you to understand the channels and sources your leads are coming from. The analysis will help you understand content marketing efforts to generate leads, as well as ROI. In turn, you’ll know where to focus your marketing budget.

So, how do you measure your law firm’s content marketing results?

One way to measure how well your web content is performing is through Google Analytics. The tool tracks your website traffic, the source of your traffic, goal completions, bounce rate, and so much more.

Social media platforms also offer useful analytics that measures metrics like engagement, clicks, likes, and more.

Metrics to look at when measuring your content marketing results include:

Email open rates
Website bounce rates
Content downloads
Number of new subscribers
Number of phone calls
Number of form fills
Social media shares
Social media clicks and likes
Website page views
Impressions on your posts

Increase Your Conversions with Content

Content marketing offers lawyers and law firms a powerful marketing channel to establish credibility with clients and increase market visibility. With a good content marketing strategy, you can win clients and improve your overall growth.

Whether you use blog articles, videos, newsletters, case studies, webinars, or eBooks, optimizing your content will ensure a wider reach. But first, you need to understand your target clients, find the right keywords, create valuable content, and create a distribution and promotion strategy. Don’t forget to measure your results to find areas that need improvement.