Set up Your Law Firm for Successful Content Marketing

by Sarah Brodsky

What questions are the ones most asked by potential customers who go on to become full-fledged clients?

It’s important to recognize that certain questions are asked often because they are vital to your niche, but it’s also because there may not be satisfactory answers to be found. Personalizing your content towards what your target audience really cares about, the information they absolutely need to know, will guarantee that it will be seen by those who need it most and who are more likely to then employ your services.

In that same vein, not only do you know your potential clients better than anyone else, but you also know your law firm and its abilities the best. All of this knowledge together—your understanding of both your clients and your legal niche—gives you very valuable and unique insight into your potential customers. You understand the intersection of where their interests and lifestyles meet the necessity of hiring your law firm. You’ll find it to be an effective content marketing choice to make the most of this knowledge, and to engineer your content in that direction. By producing content that speaks directly to your specific niche, you not only demonstrate a deep and innate knowledge of your legal sector, but you also create relevant content for your specific client, drawing them in with proof of your expertise on a personal and professional level.

The impulse is strong to engineer your content solely to what the search engines are seeking. You may have been advised to stuff your blogs full of keywords indiscriminately in order to sway Google in your favor. But it’s important to remember that, more than anything else, your content should be written for humans, not robots. Your audience has expectations, and your audience also often has a limited attention span. They not only want the information you have to offer, but also want to know why you are offering it.

As part of your 2023 content marketing planning, think about your audience not as a monolith, but as the humans that make up that pool. For many law firm marketers, this human aspect manifests itself in the storytelling within the content they create. The words you choose and the way you frame your topics can make all the difference in how your content is received. Your voice is your strongest weapon here—it’s how you can convey not only the breadth of your knowledge, but also the humanity of your business. Frame your blogs within a broader narrative, and use examples from your experience to reinforce that you are real people writing for real people. Giving your audience a beginning, middle, and end to be invested in will ensure that they’ll stay with your content narrative all the way through.

While blogs are the most common and often the easiest way to produce content, they are certainly not the only way to draw in an audience or boost your business higher on the search engine results pages. Part of this comes back to the question of attention spans— varying your offerings will, naturally, keep your audience engaged and coming back when new, unique content appears. Additionally, different people respond differently to various mediums, and everyone tends to have a preference. Diversifying your mediums in 2023 can revolutionize your digital marketing efforts. Regularly producing video content can appeal to an entirely new audience for your law firm. Similarly, podcasts have become an incredibly popular medium for disseminating information, and starting your own podcast or appearing on someone else’s can be an effective way to bring your law firm and its expertise to unexpected places.

There is a shifting culture on the internet as users begin to utilize voice search more and more. In the United States, 40.2% of users on the internet utilize voice search capabilities. As the use of voice search shifts and grows, it becomes increasingly more important to consider how voice search interacts with digital content and optimize for it, which includes understanding how users input information into voice search. If a potential client is asking a specific question about your legal niche into the voice search field—for example, “What is an estate plan?”—it is key to ensure that you have content that addresses these questions directly, both in the title and in the content itself. The more authoritative your content is when answering these questions, the more likely your content will appear at the top of the search engine results pages. Planning some content around answering the most common questions directly and thoroughly will lead more voice search users to your website.

Don’t leave your content until the last minute in 2023. Planning your topics and calendar in advance will alleviate a huge amount of pressure from the content creation process. Of course, you can’t always predict the future, and if a major world event or a development in your legal niche occurs, you’ll likely want to engineer some content related to that quickly so it remains relevant. However, aside from special circumstances, your history in your legal niche should make it relatively easy to predict the ebb and flow of your year. You know from experience what time of year you’re most likely to see new potential clients, and you know when you’re likely to have a quieter quarter. Plan your content around these cycles, and consider what topics and mediums will be best suited to each circumstance. Planning ahead will also allow you to plot out a pattern or distribution for experiments or changes in your content—for example, as you begin to utilize video as a content medium, you may wish to scatter that content throughout the year to see when it performs best. Considering the future to the best of your ability will ensure that your content remains successful in the long term. n

Sarah Brodsky is a Senior Digital Analyst at 9Sail. 9Sail is a search marketing firm that combines search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-perclick (PPC) management to help businesses solve their issues with lead generation, brand awareness, reputation building and management, and generating targeted website traffic. Learn more at: www.9Sail.com.