Best Content Marketing Tactics for Law Firms 2022

In this blog post, Marketlytics provides detailed information about content marketing for law firms. Once you have finished reading this blog post, you will understand content marketing better than most lawyers and law firms ever could, with the ability to start a content marketing strategy today!

We will start with the fundamentals of what content marketing is, before revealing the best tactics to ensure content marketing success. Let’s get started and of course, if you have any questions about content marketing for law firms, please get in touch.

Why should my law firm use content marketing?

Content produced for content marketing serves the innate purpose of providing value to the reader. Lawyers can serve content on a preliminary basis and introduce the ground-level legal processes that are to be involved. However, content marketing goes much further than just introducing readers to your service offerings.

The benefits of content marketing for law firms

Authority. You will slowly become a subject matter expert to the reader. This won’t happen overnight with a single article, that’s why businesses that participate in content marketing continue to pump out relevant and valuable content.

Discoverability. Content that is destined for your website or a third party must have Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to ensure it gets found by the right people. The same goes for social media, which should also use relevant hashtags. 

Reducing Friction. Skepticism is big in our society and needs to be overcome to ensure sales. Commercial messaging from someone you know nothing about will naturally engage defense mechanisms. The simple solution to reducing or eliminating skepticism is to educate.

How content marketing works in the real world

Here is the process of someone using Google Search to find help find a solution to their problem, with these benefits in mind.

An individual is considering a divorce from their partner. They search on Google “How to make a divorce stress-free” and receive pages of results. From here, they gravitate and click on a title that relates to their search inquiry, which provides the promise of a solution to their problem. This is where SEO comes in and helps you get discovered.

They click on” 10 Steps to a Stress-Free Divorce – John Smith Lawyers”. Next comes the most important part of the process, the content. The content of the blog provides the solution the title describes and doesn’t push your services down their throat straightaway. By reading the content you have written, the individual should now know the ten-step process to receive a stress-free divorce from their partner. This is where authority is built and friction is reduced.

Once the solution to the question is provided, now is your opportunity to introduce your relevant service with a call to action. A good piece of content marketing relates to your potential client’s desires, whilst displaying your law firm’s legal knowledge and expertise.

Where to place content marketing

Content marketing for your law firm can take place on your website, social media and even on third-party websites (which will help skyrocket your authority).

What does content marketing involve?

Content marketing involves generating and posting content that provides value to the viewer, reader or listener with social media and blog posts being the most common delivery mediums. 

To ensure maximum effectiveness with your content marketing efforts, start with a plan, define the content formats and platforms you will use, pick a relevant topic and start creating! 

Start with a content marketing plan

Before making any posts, it is important to first create a content marketing plan. A content marketing plan at its most basic will provide direction, structure and consistency. Your content marketing plan should answer the following questions to drive success:

• Who is creating the content?
• What kind of content to produce?
• When is the content being published?
• Where is the content being distributed?
• Why are you producing the content?
• How are you promoting and analysing the marketing results?

Developing a law firm content marketing plan is an art form within itself and will be detailed in a future blog, so stay tuned and watch this space. 

Assess the content formats available

Content produced for a content marketing strategy can take a few different forms and can be combined together in several different ways. The four content formats you can utilise are:

• Writing. Known as copy, can be short and long-form content
• Video. Which enables information in a condensed format
• Imagery. Which communicates information visually through infographics etc.
• Audio. Which communicates information audibly
• Courses/Workshops. Content designed to provide a deeper understanding

These formats can be used together and allow the participant to absorb your content in a way that best suits them. A blog post could include an embedded video or audio reading out the content. Whilst on social media, you could combine copy with an infographic to maximise effectiveness. Use your content marketing plan to dictate which formats will be best.

Pick a relevant topic and make the content

Here is where the consistent work comes in. It is important to keep on top of your game by regularly researching and brainstorming topics that are relevant to your target market’s pain points. Next is breaking these topics down into a digestible outline, just like with this article you are reading now.

The content you produce has to of course be within your wheelhouse, but it can answer and discuss a wide range of topics. For example, a divorce lawyer could produce content on:

• How to get a divorce
• How much a divorce costs
• How to prepare for a divorce
• How to make a divorce stress-free

All of these topics provide a solution to a problem and open the door for you to build a value-based relationship. For the example provided above, we would produce a website blog article that provides the exact ten steps needed to ensure a stress-free divorce from your partner. 

When writing content for your website, it is important to incorporate Search Engine Optimisation. It allows for easier searchability and higher placement in search results on Google. 

Choose the right platform for your content marketing

Different types of content are just stronger on certain platforms due to their nature, however, this doesn’t limit their ability to be used on other platforms in combination. As mentioned previously, content marketing can take place on your website, on social media or even on third-party websites, which can potentially reach more eyeballs than your efforts alone!

Much like advertising your legal services on the right digital channels for maximum effectiveness, content needs to be placed on channels that provide the most effectiveness.

Here are the platforms best for the four different content types:

Content-Type	Content Platform
Long-form written content	Website Blog
Short-form written content	Facebook/LinkedIn
Video	Facebook/LinkedIn/Youtube
Images	Facebook/LinkedIn
Audio	Website/Podcast Platform
Long-form educational multimedia content	Website/Online Learning Community

Provide a call-to-action

You’ve produced content that helps the viewer, reader or listener take action and move a step closer to resolving their problem, now is the time to introduce your service as a solution.

At this stage, you don’t want to sell the service too hard (that’s what your service pages are for). Instead, lead into a call to action that is relevant to the legal service, provide a contact call to action, a link to your service page or a relevant lead magnet to capture their details for future marketing messages. 

Call-to-action examples:

• Phone number and/or email
• Generic contact us in-line form
• Schedule an appointment 
• Book a free consultation
• Link to a service page
• Download content

Measure your content marketing’s effectiveness

Now it’s to time to measure your results. Whilst you aren’t putting ad spend behind your content, it is still a good idea to measure your results and thankfully, because we are hosting content on the internet, tracking and measuring content marketing effectiveness is pretty straightforward and simple. 

If you are hosting your content on a platform like WordPress, you’ll receive an SEO and readability score for your content. If you are posting videos to Youtube, you can measure watch time, audience retention and how many times the video has been shared.

Software like Hotjar allows you to understand how users behave on your website, with heatmaps based on scrolling and clicking behavouirs and the ability to record real users navigating your website. 

The undisputed king for measuring results is Google Analytics and it can be easily linked up with your website. Google Analytics tracks every conceivable action a visitor could want to take, including the number of sessions one user has taken, how long they stayed on a specific page, which digital platform did they access your website on and how they got to your website in the first place.

The best tactics for producing great content marketing for law firms

Create a content marketing strategy

As we have previously discussed, it is best to first develop a content marketing strategy before creating and posting any content. A good content marketing strategy will help ensure consistent content production and content publishing. Your content marketing strategy needs to answer:

• Who is creating the content?
• What kind of content to produce?
• When is the content being published?
• Where is the content being distributed?
• Why are you producing the content?
• How are you promoting and analysing the marketing results?

Research your target market to formulate a winning strategy

The most important piece of the puzzle in content marketing is understanding your target market. Once you have conducted some thorough research on your target market, you will better understand their pain points, motivations and typical behaviors.

This research ultimately sets you up for success and provides you with an understanding of what resonates best with your target market. Now that you understand them, you can create content that will actually be consumed.
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Get ideas from your competition

Spying on your competition is a great way to inform your own content marketing efforts, but be careful, your competition may have different target audiences dictating their strategies.

Here is how you can spy on your competition:

• Use SEMRush, a paid tool that allows you to see which keywords your competition is ranking for. Take these keywords and use them within your own strategy.
  
• Take a regular look at your competition’s blog and take notes on what content they are producing. Start producing your own content around the same subject areas using the same or similar keywords.
  
• Sign up for your competition’s marketing emails and download their lead magnets. Use these sources to come up with new content ideas.

Conduct SEO keyword research

Use a platform like SEMRush or Ahrefs to undertake some valuable keyword research. These platforms allow you to discover the types of keywords your target audience is typically searching for. You can also find related keywords, the keywords your competition uses, backlink opportunities, plus much more.

Whilst these types of platforms typically come at a price, the investment you make will be well worth it in the long term. 

Make your content align with your brand narrative

Knowing which content your target audience wants is one thing, producing it to reflect your business is another. To maximise your effectiveness, make sure your content aligns with your brand narrative. Your brand narrative consists of your values, mission statement, tone of voice and all the other things that make your law firm who it is.

To make your content consistent, we recommend developing a document that outlines these areas. 

Should my law firm website have a blog?

The short answer is yes. By now, you should be thoroughly convinced that creating a blog for your law firm marketing is a good idea. A blog is just one of many ways to deliver content marketing and is arguably the best platform.

Your website is owned and operated by yourself, giving you complete control over what happens. It is the primary place for your target audience to understand who you are and what you stand for. Couple this with SEO and you will soon get discovered much easier. 

Adding a blog to your website will increase your overall authority and discoverability online, whilst reducing the friction of purchasing your services.

Should I write my own law firm blog content?

If you have the time to write your own law firm blog content, we say do it! As a lawyer, you should understand the law better than most people ever could and not to mention, your law firm as well.

Blog content does take some time to produce and could be better off with a team member who is relatively well-versed in the topic. Hiring some marketing staff to handle the whole process from top to bottom could also be a good solution.

If getting the content made in-house isn’t possible, start looking for legal content writers to produce your content. 

How do I find legal content writers for my blog?

There are a few options to find a legal content writer for your blog. We recommend firstly speaking with anyone you or your colleagues already know. They, like everyone else you come across, should preferably have knowledge or experience with the legal industry.

Furthermore, they should preferably be from your own country, state or city, as laws in different jurisdictions are not always the same. 

If you don’t have anyone in your network, start doing some research on who is out there providing legal content writing. There are content writers for almost every industry, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find one. 

Websites like Fivver, Upwork and Freelancer give you the ability to discover legal content writers. You can also post projects to these platforms and see who answers. The quality of the work always varies, so make sure to do your due diligence beforehand.

Important: Always review the content produced by third parties. You want to ensure the content is factually correct, general legal information is provided only and that there are no guarantees made within the content. 

How long does it take to get results from content marketing?

Results from law firm content marketing could take up to 6 months to reveal themselves. How quickly you get results is dependent on the quality, consistency and relevance of the content you are producing, but also other factors outside of content marketing. 

We are talking about your current reputation within the marketplace, how your website presents, operates and communicates to the target audience and branding to name a few factors that could consciously or subconsciously inhibit action being taken. Making sure these factors are up to standard will help ensure the effectiveness of your content marketing long-term. 

Related Content Marketing Questions

Do I provide legal advice in my content marketing?

You should never provide specific legal advice within your content marketing. The content you produce should only ever provide general legal information to the audience.

It is important that all content marketing materials are reviewed to ensure only general legal information is provided. Always review content produced by third parties. You want to ensure the content is factually correct, general legal information is provided only and that there are no guarantees made within the content. 

Should I be on all social media platforms or just a select few?

You should only be on the social media platforms that make strategic sense to your law firm. Facebook and LinkedIn are the main social media platforms to consider for all law firms, as they serve a good majority of legal consumers. 

Are there any social media platforms you should avoid?

We personally believe that law firms should actively avoid Twitter, as only 1 in 10 Australians use the platform. We would also recommend avoiding Pinterest and Tik Tok, as these platforms are very nice for marketing law firms.

What's the difference between content marketing and paid marketing?

Content marketing typically doesn’t require capital investment, whereas paid marketing has an advertising spend component to allow for further audience reach. Content marketing is an organic advertising strategy that leverages Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). 

What's the difference between social media content and search engine content?

Social media content is provided on a platform that serves content to account followers organically. This content appears periodically through the user’s interface and can be accessed on the law firm’s social media account at any time.

Search engine content is delivered through a search engine after an inquiry has been provided. The results provided by the search engine are based on several Search Engine Optimisation factors. The blog content that appears within the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) can be accessed later on the law firm’s blog page.