Content Marketing for Law Firms
Despite the obvious fact that legal prospects are constantly looking for law firms and attorneys who have built authority online. However, many lawyers we talk to haven’t ever considered the content for their law firm websites. What your website says — literally and visually — ultimately makes up a person’s mind over whether to contact you.
Simultaneously, the content you provide outside your website—be it in the form of answering questions on social media groups, writing articles, and/or blog posts that provide valuable information—should define you as an expert in your field.
A few years ago, a top-quality inbound & content strategy for law firms was a choice — you could use it to improve your online presence, or you could stick to more traditional digital marketing methods.
Today, providing valuable content is an absolute must. All your competitors do and if you don’t, you won’t stand a chance.
What Is Content Marketing for Lawyers?
Content marketing for law firms is the creation and distribution of different types of helpful content (with SEO copywriting) for the purposes of marketing your law firm. Creating content can take different forms, like making a blog post, video, etc.
Unlike traditional advertising, attorney content marketing is supposed to relay your message without selling a product. It is a pretty fine line. You need to show your target audience that you’re an expert, and that you can solve an issue. Become their guide.
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How to Do Content Marketing for Law Firms
Content marketing itself has several steps to keep in mind if you want to create a successful strategy.
1. Do your research. Before you create content you need to know what to write about. Keeping your hand on the pulse of your area of practice, doing keyword research, and targeting specific clients can help you know in what direction to develop.
Making a list of frequently asked questions is also helpful: the questions you answer daily in emails, during phone calls, and during in-person meetings with prospects. This is a surefire way to create content your prospects will actually read.
2. Create engaging content. Create blog posts, videos, social media posts, and more, based on the results of your research. Don’t just write for search engines, though. Write for people. Make your content engaging and interesting to read or watch.
3. Have somewhere to post it. Having good law firm content is great, but you also need a place to post it. Social media is an important channel of any law firm’s marketing plan, so use Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms to distribute your content effectively, including your website.
Next, look for platforms – like local publications, www.quora.com, www.medium.com, and attorneys directories that may need your type of content. Write short articles for them and include links to your detailed posts. This enhances your website’s authority, which optimizes your page for higher Google rankings.
4. Convert new leads. Yes, we told you earlier to not just sell your services but to become a guide. This step does not contradict that. Because still, any content strategy is all about attracting new clients. Learn to use call-to-actions to convert your traffic into leads.
5. Measure and adjust. Always check your statistics online. Your law firm’s content can give you a lot of insight into what people are interested in, what works, and what doesn’t. To attract new clients, you need to always be in the know and adjust your marketing or even your content accordingly.
Follow these steps and legal content marketing will be easier than ever for you. These pieces of content will help you boost your online presence and generate a lot more new leads. You draw people in with your content, not just outright sell them a service.
Not ready to do it on your own? Work with an agency that provides content marketing services. They’ll create, publish and monitor the content for you.
How Content Marketing for Lawyers Works
Anytime you, me or anyone purchases something with considerable value, be it a service or a product, we go through what marketers call the “buyer’s journey”.
There is a lot to be said about the buyer’s journey and how it works with legal content marketing, but we’ll just touch on it now.
The buyer’s journey consists of 3 stages:
- Awareness. This is the stage where we’re aware that there may be a problem in the near future, but we’re still looking to define it and figure out whether we have to do something about it and what. Here’s an example: If an elderly parent without a will is ill and knows the worst is coming, they’re aware they may need an estate lawyer, but might unsure as to how professional legal counsel will help.
- Consideration. This is where they’re already aware of the issue, but aren’t looking for providers yet—just information. At this stage, people ask questions like: Do I need to hire an attorney, or can I prep a will myself and just have it notarized? What kind of attorney would I require? How much would an estate attorney cost me?
- Decision. This is the stage where one is actively looking for providers and choosing a lawyer, i.e., deciding who can deliver the right service at the right price.
Essentially, because prospects do not reach out to lawyers in the initial two stages, attorney content marketing is the only sensible way for you to connect with them during these phases. This is not the time to sell, but the time to be helpful while showing your expertise. Be a helpful friend and build trust.
In fact, if you attempt to sell at this stage, chances are you will compromise the connection between you and a prospect—a clear sign that you don’t really understand the goals of content marketing!
Law Firm Content Marketing Ideas
Regardless of what type of content you invest in, each piece should aim to build your brand, improve relationships with customers, create a trustworthy entity and prove credibility, which drives sales.
Anything you produce that people read, listen to or watch is part of your content marketing. Popular formats include:
- Blogs
- eBooks
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Infographics
Blog posts are great for answering questions in-depth, whereas short videos work best on social media and should be under two minutes. Here, you’re looking to provide brief answers to questions or simple explanations.
Now, you’re probably thinking, this sounds like a lot of work. Make no mistake, creating content for law firms is. However, there are smart ways to generate law firm content. You can follow this simple method below:
Write a blog post.
- Divide it into three short LinkedIn posts.
- Formulate eight tweets from your LinkedIn content.
- Turn those tweets into videos.
- Post them on social media.
- Turn your blog into a YouTube post.
- Send a summary of the main points to your email list.
Can you see how one piece of content actually translates to 22 pieces?
The Goals of Content Marketing for Lawyers
When a prospect Googles a question that relates to your niche and sees a post that matches their search query, they will click on it, and read it. Now, you have one more website visitor!
If your content for your law firm website is top quality, this visitor will spend more time on your page, which boosts your SEO performance (bringing more potential clients to your website). It also helps you achieve an important content marketing goal.
Get the contact information of potential clients.
Answering one of your prospect’s questions will lead to more questions. Now is the time to offer a so-called “lead magnet” — a downloadable document with additional information or with other helpful functions (check-list, report, or other) — in exchange for your visitor’s contact details.
Having their contact info lets you communicate with them in the future, offering useful attorney content marketing assets that periodically engage with them until they’re ready to engage with you. This can be automated (Ask us how.)
Is Attorney Content Marketing Good for SEO?
Creating extra content allows you to rank higher for additional keywords and draw in relevant traffic. For example, users searching for “how much does divorce cost”, are likely looking for a divorce lawyer.
Valuable content for law firms can take several forms. A common one is an FAQ section placed on a designated page on your site. This section could contain questions and answers to the client inquiries you hear most often. If you’re able to write answers succinctly, you may even end up having them show up in a featured Google snippet (high in SERPs).
A content strategy for law firms accomplishes the same goal. Blogging gives you a way to create ongoing content to stay relevant in search engines while generating new content for relevant keywords. Having a blog that fits in with your brand can also help you earn trust early on.
YMYL and Google EAT for Law Firms
YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) and EAT (Expertise, Authority, and Trust) are relatively new search guidelines used by Google to determine the reliability of a law firm’s website’s content.
YMYL content is how Google refers to content that could potentially have a negative impact on the quality of people’s lives and/or finances. Because this content has such a profound influence on people’s lives, Google holds it to a much higher standard and actually has a team of people to assess its credibility.
Of course, legal content marketing falls under this banner. As a search engine, Google wants to deliver the best content for every query, and know it can trust results, which is where EAT for lawyers comes in.
One of the ways to make sure your YMYL content is shown by Google is to ensure it embodies expertise, authority, and trust. Search Engine Land says EAT is about value, reliability, and integrity.
While it’s not an exact science, content that finds a balance between being comprehensive and keeping it simple and following SEO best practices will achieve a higher EAT score. And that translates to better SEO.
Is Law Firm Content Marketing Worth It?
Content marketing is the only way for law firms to cut through a highly competitive and saturated online market, especially when it comes to collecting leads and converting them into cases.
In fact, 84% of law firms generate leads through organic social media traffic, and considering 38% of people use the internet to find an attorney; it’s well within a law firm’s interest to invest in content marketing.
When executed properly, content marketing for lawyers has numerous benefits, such as increased business exposure, more leads, and a high ROI. Email marketing, for instance, can generate an ROI of over 4000%!
However, to achieve a consistent stream of high-quality legal leads, you need to map out their buying journey from the first touchpoint to booking a consultation. Then, build a content lead generation process and consistently optimize the pipeline to streamline a potential client’s journey.
The way to think of it is like this: The more time your prospects have to do research and the higher the stakes for them, the more you should invest in content marketing.
Want to speak with an expert?
Call us at (312) 265-0580
How Can a Law Firm Content Marketing Agency Boost Your Revenue?
Comrade is a Chicago-based digital marketing company specializing in website design and marketing for attorneys. Our inbound and content marketing team has developed a specific methodology to help your company stand out from the crowd.
We can create or re-work your content to ensure: It is simple (your clients do not understand your terminology), well targeted (this could only be guaranteed upon our extensive buyer persona modeling), and written to inspire further interest in your services without going directly for a sales pitch.
We are also recognized as a top Illinois Web Design Agency on DesignRush. Contact us for a free consultation, or to hire the best content marketing services for lawyers.
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Natalie: So the subject that we would like to talk about today has to do with content. We know, especially in the last couple of years, everyone’s talking about content marketing, content, publishing more content, videos, content is the king. You hear it everywhere. So today we wanted to share our thoughts and ideas about, so what content marketing is and what can you do to help your digital marketing with content marketing.
Sasha: Yeah. So as you’re watching this video, you’re actually consuming a form of content right? Content can come in various forms, as long as it’s words that deliver certain meaning and that meaning has to be helpful to whoever is consuming this content, right? So us creating this video should be helpful to you, an attorney to understand how content marketing can or may not work for you because content marketing definitely does not work for every type of attorney practicing in every specialty or not specialty, practice area.
Sasha: So let me tell you who content marketing is not going to work very well for, although it works to a very limited extent. If you practice personal injury, chances are this may work to a very limited extent. If you practice criminal defense, chances are content marketing can work very, very well. If you practice estate law, chances are content marketing is going to work very, very well.
Sasha: If you do, oh let’s say DUIs and traffic, chances are content marketing is not going to work terribly well although it will work to a certain extent.
Natalie: Why not?
Sasha: Well because there’s this immediate need by it. You need someone now because you are in jail or you don’t care because you got a traffic ticket, you’re not going to read or watch videos where an attorney explains how they will get you out of this.
Sasha: However, when you think about estate right, for estate planning attorneys and those that deal with all facets of estate law, like this where people like actually do consume content because they’re looking for information for answers to their questions before they may engage with an attorney because people want to understand before they start spending money right.
Sasha: A lot of people think like can I go to like one of those online platforms and just do it myself for $30, what’s the popular one for law? I forget the name of it. There’s a big website where you can do a lot of legal documents. Legal Zoom. Legal Zoom, right? Like $30, $50, $100 whatever you know. You can do a lot of documents and some consumers may say, okay so the difference between $5000, spending with an attorney and spending $99 with Legal Zoom … I have no idea what it actually costs, like, “Why should I spend that extra $4900?” Right? So you can create content that explains the difference, right?
Sasha: So let’s talk about content marketing, what it actually is supposed to do and what it looks like. So, video is a format of content marketing. Blogging is a format of content marketing, and the goal or the goals for content marketing is number one, it attracts prospective clients. So when people use Google to search for information, they’re not ready to buy, to consume legal services, they’re just looking for information, right? So your goal is to attract. So the more and the better content that you have on your website, and other platforms pointing back to your website, the better, right?
Sasha: Google loves it when you post useful information, and usefulness of information is determined by Google when someone searches for the information. And they see 10 results in Google or 20 results in Google, right? And when they click on your link, that’s the first indicator to Google that the search query matches the listing that they see. And number two indication is when Google … When, not Google, when the user, when they look at the information they stay on that page for a considerable amount of time. And when I say a considerable amount of time, a minute or two can be considered the considerable amount of time, sometimes three minutes, sometimes four minutes, five minutes. The more dwell time … That’s what Google calls it, dwell time, they have on that page, the more relevance and authority Google gives to that page.
Sasha: So, those are very important factors, and the third very important factor is once again, how many other sources, other websites, and directors are pointing to that one page? Google loves that kind of thing, so your first and foremost objective is to attract, right? Get that attention. And as they consume it, your second foremost objective, if it is a suitable piece of content is to get them to raise their hand and say, “I am interested in whatever solution that you may be offering.” And how do you do that?
Sasha: Well, let’s say that you do practice estate law. You can write or film content, and then for more in-depth information or a checklist or some sort of other documents/tool, you can offer it as a downloadable on your website. So a person consumes the information, and you say, “By the way, when you do this, you need a checklist, and you can download it here.” And when they download it, they download it in exchange for their content information. This creates an early stage lead for you, and this time when they download it, you know that John Doe is looking for information on this subject. You can guess what it is they’re going to do next. They will most likely hire an attorney to help them address whatever issue that they’re trying to solve.
Sasha: So, by getting their contact information, you give yourself an opportunity to communicate with them again. And how do you do that? Well you set up an email sequence, and here’s how you do it, let me simplify this process for you really.
Sasha: So think about it this way: whenever you talk to a new prospective client, invariably, when you take a sample of 100 prospective clients that you talk to, invariably they ask you very similar same questions in almost every conversation. Let’s say it’s between half a dozen and a dozen questions that tend to repeat almost every single time.
Sasha: So you can create content in video format, or written format, or best, both formats, and post it in your blog, and distribute it elsewhere, and we’ll address that in another post. And for every suitable post, you can have a downloadable, right? And once they download one thing, you know that invariably, they will be asking similar or same questions as you have already answered in other posts. And what you can do is you can present them this information in a very logical sequence, where they get an email once every two, three days. And they’ll be very, very pleasantly surprised that you actually present them with useful information that they might have not thought about, or that they were going to ask, and there you are. Like a magic genie, you show up with the right content.
Sasha: At this point, you do not appear as a salesperson, but as a very, very helpful provider that can help them solve their problem. Because you continue sending them this useful information, they naturally develop a bias to working with you rather than working with their competitors. And in a nutshell, this is how content marketing works. One, you attract, two, you convert, and when I say convert, once again, you convert them in the early stage when they’re discovering information. You convert them on the website by just getting their content information. And three, you engage with them continuously, engage with them until they’re ready to talk. Until they’re ready to engage with you and say, “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Attorney, I am ready to ask a few more questions to make sure that we have a good fit so that I can hire you to do this thing for me that you do.”
Natalie: I also think we need to talk about the different stages of buyer’s journey, and where the prospective clients are, in which stage those prospective clients are so that your content can match whatever they’re looking for. So if it’s just a question, so, “How do I get my DUI ticket fixed?” for example. So, this would be one stage, versus another stage where someone has had already an accident and they’re trying to find a different kind of information.
Sasha: Sure.
Sasha: Okay, so this is expansive, with a subject, right? So, buyer’s journey. We all participate in it whenever we go to buy, consume something that’s not just a daily utility, this is not the grocery shopping, but this is looking for a provider, professional service provider, or buying a vehicle, or anything that’s considerable value and then there are substantial concerns when you hire or when you look at different options, right? So, buyer’s journey has three stages in it, and I’m going to go through this really quickly because this video’s really not about that, but let’s just say this very quickly.
Sasha: So there are three stages. There is awareness, consideration, and decision. In the awareness stage, we know that there is a problem. We can’t quite define the problem possibly yet, we’re not looking for a solution yet, but we know that there is a problem, right? So we’re looking for a definition to the problem, and understanding what it is that needs to be done. An example, for estate planning attorney, an aging parent, right? Who doesn’t have a will, hasn’t done any estate planning, and you know that one unfortunate day they will be gone, and then you and your siblings will need to deal with this. You understand that you need to prepare for this, but you do not know how, so there’s awareness of the problem, that it’s coming up sometime down the road.
Sasha: The next phase where from awareness, you go into consideration, you start actually researching different solutions, right? Different information to the problem. So you start looking, like, “What do I need to do in this case?” Right? And you start looking like, “Okay, so how do I create a will?” Or, “How do I do estate planning?” Or, “Will my parents’ estate be taxed?” Whatever. Right? So you’re looking for answers but you’re not ready to hire an attorney yet, right? So you’re just consuming information, just like in the examples that I used before, right? People are not ready to buy your service yet, they are simply looking for information because they’re considering different options, not different providers.
Sasha: So, and then the decision stage, they already know that they need to hire an estate attorney and now they’re going to be deciding between different providers. So, this is the stage where they will make a decision who they’re going to hire. Now, if you show up early enough in their awareness or consideration stage, you will develop, if your content is good, you will develop-
Natalie: With the right kind of content.
Sasha: … A natural … With the right kind of content, right? Which will deliver that, you need to deliver it repeatedly, it can’t be one-off content, right? If it’s one-off content, the chance of you being forgotten are astronomically high. So, you want to make sure that you deliver that content on an ongoing basis until they’re ready to make that decision until they step into the decision making phase.
Natalie: And if you came too early with your talking about how great your firm is when they’re just in the awareness stage, that’s not gonna work as well.
Sasha: Dealbreaker, yeah. This is not about pitching you, how great you are. This is not pitching your services. This is being a helpful friend, acquaintance, to the person who is looking to solve certain problems or fill certain informational gaps. You’re spot on with this, do not attempt to sell until they’re ready to talk about buying. If you do, it will be an absolute deal breaker, and your content marketing will fail, though it will not be the failure of content marketing, it will be the failure of that specific attempt to sell. So never do that.
Natalie: I think the final piece of information that we haven’t shared yet, okay, “I’m convinced I need to do content marketing, so where do I start? There are so many things I can talk about. I can have a list of those questions prepared that’s the frequently asked questions, but where do I start, and where do I distribute this content?”
Sasha: Okay. So, another great, expansive subject.
Sasha: So, how do you start? Do what we do. We don’t just preach this, we do this, right? So we actually do video production, which we turn into written content, which we distribute on our blog and social media. And then we look for platforms which would be interested in this type of content and write short articles for those platforms. And then we’ll link up from those platforms to our blog posts, so Google sees that we’re reputable because there are a lot of sources that they’re linking up to us.
Sasha: So start by getting a tripod, and a decent, like $50 lavalier mic, and plug it into your phone and make sure that lighting is decent in whatever room that you’re going to record, you don’t have crazy shadows, because a window is right here and your left side is absolutely dark, and your right side is absolutely bright, and then just start recording. Don’t worry about making this perfect. Do not let … Love this quote. Do not let perfection get in the way of publishing.
Sasha: No one’s content is perfect; you don’t need to worry about perfection. Just make it good, and the way you make it good is what you already do every day. People ask you questions, they call you, they ask you questions, or they send you emails, or they send you requests via a contact us form, and you just answer them. Give them the most useful information you can, and that will be a great start.
Sasha: Then, either after you record the video, rewrite it yourself, or hire a ghostwriter or get a marketing company that can do this for you. We do this, but we actually rewrite our video content in a blog format so it’s actually consumable, right? And then a few other tricks that you need to do with the content to make sure that it’s highly searchable, and that it’s highly ranked by Google.
Sasha: But get all of those things done, or don’t worry about it. Just hire a proficient digital marketing company that will do everything but these video recordings. And trust me, you can do these video recordings yourself all day long, it’s as easy as picking up the phone and answering questions to your prospective clients. Yeah?
Natalie: I agree, yup.
Sasha: Cool. I think that’s a wrap, thanks for watching.
Natalie: Thanks.
Frequently Asked Questions
