All personal injury attorneys are lawyers, but not all lawyers are personal injury attorneys. As lawyers, you are no stranger to this logical statement. It’s a simple statement but makes a big difference in how you think about a category of items. Use this method of thinking when approaching your content production. All content marketing is informative, but not all informative content is content marketing. If you’re only creating informative content without considering its marketing capabilities, then you’ll easily be lead to believe that content marketing doesn’t work.
This guide will show you how to change your way of thinking and content creation approach to create content that is both informative and effective at marketing.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing campaigns give people a reason to go to your website by giving them useful information. Content marketing gives valuable content but also creates a community and gives them a reason to return. This increases your organic traffic page views, and SEO performance.
Creating quality content is actually easier than creating just content. Many lawyers get distracted by the meat and potatoes of the content. They become focused on becoming the expert and writing about every angle of the article’s topic. This obsessive and thorough approach works great for your legal work, but isn’t the best approach for your content marketing.
The result is long and drawn-out blogs that are convoluted and confusing for the average reader. Your typical client didn’t go to law school, so you’re not writing for your audience. There’s a fear among lawyers that short and laser-focused content will look incomplete.
In short, you don’t want to do these things:
- Try to cover every angle in a single article.
- Trying to avoid criticism or conflict by writing in a soft tone.
- Only writing long and drawn-out articles to avoid looking incomplete or lacking knowledge.
The Goal of Content Marketing
When you decide to shift your focus to content marketing, you should also shift your audience focus. You are no longer writing for yourself, your firm’s partners, or fellow lawyers. You are writing for your clients. Focus on writing high-quality effective content that serves the best interest of your potential and current clients. You should write the kind of content that your prospective clients want to read.
- Commit to posting on a regular schedule.
- Focus on appealing to your target audience and not worrying about critics from the wrong audience.
- Embrace short and to the point content.
When you take this approach, you don’t have to know everything to get started. You only need to know something. Think about it this way. If you wrote everything there is to know about a particular topic in one article, you’ll quickly run out of content topics. Then what would you write about?
Let’s use divorce as an example. Every divorce has similar elements, but they also come with unique challenges. You wouldn’t want to write an epic article that addresses all of them. Readers will quickly grow disinterested and give up looking for information about their particular situation. You also only have one massive article that was time-consuming to write and not effective at content marketing.
Now let’s consider the alternative. You write a series of articles about divorce. Each article addresses a unique situation, the laws that apply, and potential outcomes. You could then link to other articles that are relevant for further information. Your series of articles title could look something like this:
- How to do a simple divorce
- Divorce when you have children
- How to divide financial assets during a divorce
- What to do with a marital home during divorce
- What happen when you have a prenup
With this strategy you can create better content. Search engines will have an easier time understanding what the article is about. This will result in an improve in your performance metrics. A single piece of content with a focused topic will rank well for those targeted keywords.
5 Elements to Content Marketing
If you’re already producing content, then you have a great starting point for developing it into content marketing. you can turn your old content into new content, which gives you a boost in SEO performance. To get started turning it into the best content, look at your existing content and ask if it has these five qualities:
- Value
- Significance
- Perspective
- Offer
- Community
1. Value
How does the article add value to your audience? If your content isn’t bringing value, then it’s considered fluff. This is content that contains a lot of words but doesn’t convey any new or useful information. Creating fluffy content is a waste of your time and will only frustrate your audience as they look for answers.
Adding value to your own content can turn good content into great content.
2. Significance
What’s at stake with this article? Could it mean the difference between someone getting the legal help they need and not? Your articles are crucial because they provide a basic legal education to your audience. This helps you to have a better-informed client, who can better contribute to their legal representation.
Unlike other small businesses and startups, you aren’t convincing people to buy a product. People already know they need a lawyer when they face legal trouble. Your job is to convince them to hire your firm over another.
3. Perspective
Why should your audience care about a particular topic? For some, this will be an easy question to answer. For others, you’ll need to explain to your audience why they should care. Everyone cares about how a lawyer charges their fees and how expensive the services are. However, not many people know or care that there is a code of ethics that governs attorneys and how they go about charging their fees.
An article explaining fee structures will be obvious to the audience as to why they care. You’ll need to show them why the code of ethics is important to them. Additionally, writing about billing systems wouldn’t be relevant to your client audience at all. They don’t need to know or care what software you’ve chosen to use.
4. Offer
Is it clear from your article that you’re offering legal services? It’s one thing to write legal articles. It’s another to write legal articles that will attract clients. A visitor to your website needs to understand that you are a law office offering legal services.
5. Community
How can you invite your audience to engage with you? Look for ways to engage with your audience and get them involved in what you’re writing about. This can be slightly more challenging since legal services are private in nature. You don’t want to risk attorney-client privilege.
Try ending your article by soliciting the reader to contribute. you could ask them to comment with a question related to the article’s topic. Or you could start a discussion about a current change in the law and what it means for the future. You could also direct them to your firm’s LinkedIn page. you can then connect your content marketing efforts with your social media marketing strategy.
Give Content Marketing a Chance
As you can see, there’s a difference between writing content and producing content marketing. Content marketers have known this for years and it’s time you did too. It’s time to take a second serious look at your content marketing strategy. It should contain a mix of digital marketing efforts, such as social media, white papers, email marketing, influencer partnerships, infographics, blogging, podcasts, case studies, webinars, email newsletters. This will create a complete user experience across all platforms with different types of content.
Contact me today and let’s revamp your content marketing efforts.