How Legal Firms can benefit from Content Marketing

A law firm aims to serve clients and to develop relationships. With a bit of luck, moreover, they will make some money along the way.
However, this is often easier said than done. In addition to these primary goals, it’s of the utmost importance that legal firms have an effective marketing strategy to further their business and financial interests. In 2014 and beyond, law firms really need to use content marketing to achieve their aims successfully.
Regardless of your particular area of practice, great content marketing has one clear objective – to make your firm the definitive thought-leader in your respective field and/or location.

There can be no doubt that many legal firms are under a lot of pressure these days. An unparallelled reputation, built up over years of excellent service, is simply not enough to give your business a cutting edge – especially online. Even the most prominent legal firms are beginning to embrace content marketing to differentiate themselves amongst their competitors. A fantastic content marketing strategy has the ability to give your clients and prospects a better idea of your expertise. Whether you specialise in property or criminal law, you want your firm to be the absolute leader within that field.
Being a thought-leader within your sector is doubly effective. On the one hand, building up an excellent reputation and promoting your firm at every level will generate more leads and create prospect relationships. On the other hand, moreover, great content marketing has the capacity to make a legal firm a thought-leader and stand out amongst its competitors. By consistently writing informative and valuable blogs, for example, you can help make your firm the ‘go-to’ experts in that sector. That’s just one way of how you generate a network of influence around you and your brand.
However, it’s not as difficult as it seems. One of the biggest challenges facing legal firms today is finding the time and expertise to develop an effective content marketing campaign. Within individual firms, so much time is spent on core legal work that marketing often falls by the wayside. Many people believe that occasional newsletters, sporadic LinkedIn updates, and the odd email is enough to give a legal firm a strong online presence. They couldn’t be further from the truth. There’s no point in half measures and your marketing strategy should be exactly the same.
Content marketing comprises of various components and requires consistent, long-term application to achieve the best possible results. Nevertheless, a lot has changed in recent years with regards to how people understand and utilise content on the web. Legal firms no longer need to spend extortionate amounts of money to create an effective marketing plan. Furthermore, there is a plethora of content formats and strategies which can be catered to suit the individual. Every firm is different and your marketing content should reflect your business’ personality.
For those who are interested in learning more about the different opportunities that content marketing can offer legal firms, here is a detailed summary:
Content marketing can be thought of as an umbrella term; one which incorporates strategy, format, type, platform, metrics, goals, triggers, and checklist all under one banner. These are all very separate entities but altogether they create something incredibly powerful. With this in mind, then, we have all the information you could need to understand content marketing and all of its various components.

Strategy

Before you even think about your content marketing, you need to develop a strategy for you and your business.
The purpose of content strategy is to determine the following points:

Who will read your content?
What valuable content can you give your customers?
What type of topics and themes will you specialise in?
What will your content give that your competitors can’t?
How will content benefit your business?
How will you execute and maintain your content?
How will you use online channels to promote your content?

This might seem like an extensive list, but these are all considerations that are essential when developing a content marketing strategy. Only by asking these questions can you be sure that you are creating meaningful content that people will actually be able to see. There’s no point creating a fantastic podcast, or an eloquently-written article, if you don’t develop a marketing strategy to advertise it online. The internet is over-saturated with people competing for space and you need to make sure your voice is heard. That’s why content strategy is so important.
If it makes things simpler, it’s probably easier to think of it as contentstrategies. Like any business, your marketing strategy is a long-term process which will evolve according to the needs of a firm. It’s not a permanent solution that will solve all of your marketing needs. Your financial targets may change, you may move premises, and may alter your business rhetoric. This is why your strategy has to be flexible. Content strategies, therefore, incorporate all of the following branches:

Writing and Editing: this is the part of your content strategy which develops the actual content. During this process, your writers need to think about which tone of voice they’ll use and refine what your company policies are. Part of their job will be to write valuable content, edit it, and monitor an editorial calendar.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): SEO is an invaluable tool which helps to ensure that your content is accessible on the internet. When users search with Google, for example, they can be bombarded with hundreds of millions of results for any particular topic. However, chances are, they’ll only click on the results which appear on the first page. It’s the job of SEO to bring your company’s website to that first page (and as close to the top as possible).
Content channel strategy: Nowadays, users and clients alike are able to access information through a variety of mediums. Computers, mobile phones and tablets are all different ‘channels’ by which a company can communicate with their audience. However, it’s vital that your content has been properly configured to work on all of these devices. A content channel strategist will decide how your content will be made accessible.

For legal firms, it’s absolutely essential that your content strategy is able to target and reach the appropriate people. There’s no use in you creating fantastic content if no one ever sees it. Moreover, search engines like Google and Bing will actively reward companies who develop a marketing strategy will delivers valuable content. Tools such as ‘Google Authorship’ give companies the opportunity to attach their name and brand to their content. This helps to ensure that your online material is protected and created exclusively for your own legal firm. Altogether, a well-planned and well-executed marketing strategy is one of the major components for allowing legal firms to distinguish themselves from their competitors.

Format

Beyond your content strategy, a legal firm has to decide what type of format they’ll use to present their content. The great thing about content is that it’s a very flexible and fluid method of communication. Whether you decide to use blogs, articles, or even videos, there’s something to suit everyone. Even more so, you definitely don’t need to stick with one method (and we certainly wouldn’t recommend that you do). Here is a list of some of the most popular content formats and their advantages:

Articles and Blogs: According to a recent study, 64% of marketers believe that articles are an effective way for businesses to communicate with their customers. However, it’s more than just any old article or blog.Long-form content has become a buzz-word in content marketing and refers specifically to content which is over 2000 words long. It’s become especially popular amongst businesses because long-form content attracts more online traffic than its shorter counterparts. Put simply, long-form content in articles and blogs gives writer a better opportunity to provide more meaningful content to customers. That’s why 79% of B2B marketers use articles and 65% have their own specially dedicated blogs.If you needed any more reason to have your own blog, 78% of CMOs stated this year that custom-created, long-form content was the future of marketing.In addition to this, there are some legal firms which have already had incredible success by using blogs to promote their company. Kingsley Napley, for example, has a dedicated and sector-specific blog site which discusses the latest trends and news events which affect the industry. The reason that Kingsley Napley has been so successful is that they’ve chosen a niche topic to blog about. They don’t claim to be experts in everything (who is?) and in doing so they’ve become thought-leaders in their own right. Therefore, Kingsley Napley’s online blog has become as much a part of their brand identity as the service they offer. This is why blogging is such a fantastic opportunity for legal firms. They help to distinguish you from your competitors and refine your own brand identity.
Press Releases: press releases are a great way for law firms to give their clients and competitors quick news updates. They are very cheap (free if you are sending via email) and press releases can increase your online traffic through web-links.However (like many content formats) we would recommend a note of caution with press releases. While they are quick and cheap, they are tend to lack personalisation and can be easily dismissed. Given that they are generally short, it’s very unlikely than a press release will have any long-term lasting impact.Nevertheless, a press release can be incredibly useful for law firms when they are used in conjunction with other content formats and a wider marketing strategy.

At Neil Walker Digital Group, we love to get creative with different types of content format. More often than not, the most powerful marketing strategy incorporates all of these formats at one point or the other. Articles and blogs can be fantastic for giving your clients valuable and impactful content, but you also need to promote them with social media and email. Similarly, press releases are a great way to keep your clients up to date with the latest news but they aren’t hugely effective on their own. The various components of content strategy are, therefore, deeply inter-connected and they require mutual support.

Content Type

The type of content that you use will also be a significant component in shaping how clients interact with and remember your brand. At the most basic level, content type can be best understood as the purpose of your content. This can be any one of the following options:

Reviews
Quizzes
Research
Event-based
Opinion
Testimonials
Case Studies
Interview
Templates
Surveys
Experiments
Trends

Depending on the mechanisms of your content strategy, different content types will suit your purpose at different times. However, regardless of your content type, there are some rules which should apply regardless. If you are going to conduct an interview with a solicitor on the latest challenges facing the sector, then the content needs to be informative and helpful. It should contribute to your overall effort of making your firm a thought-leader in its respective field. The same principle is true if you want to publish a case-study on the latest legal trends in the property sector. The content has to be insightful, interesting, and have long-term value. Only by doing so can you ensure that all of your efforts will eventually pay off.
Content marketing, specifically content type, should be a vehicle for company promotion. You want to give your prospects practical information that they’ll use and then send to colleagues/competitors. This is the true measure of content value. Additionally, this is why at Neil Walker Digital we have no time for content for content’s sake. Everything we do is catered specifically to improve the quality of your brand and your customers’ overall interactive experience.

Platform

Before you begin to question the role of social media in all of this, content platform is the umbrella term which incorporates the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. There are so many benefits for using social media to promote your legal firm, but it has to be a valuable and consistent effort. Like our other content types, there’s no use in utilising social media unless you have something interesting to contribute. The internet is already full of people competing for attention. So, if you want to use social media in your business (and why wouldn’t you?) then you have to do it right. Here are some of the most useful social media tools to help legal firms:

LinkedIn is a fantastic tool for legal firms because it generates more B2B business than any other social media tool. Moreover, LinkedIn is wonderfully versatile in terms of its use for legal firms. First of all, you can keep updated (and update others) on the latest developments within your industry/business. You can also recruit potential candidates; a fantastic opportunity which will allow you to save time and money. However, it’s also a useful tool to help reinforce a company’s role as a thought-leader within their sector.
The LinkedIn discussion boards allow individuals to talk about events, articles, and topics which are of particular interest to them. This has been going on for some time now but LinkedIn is changing. It will be of special interest to legal firms that LinkedIn is now become a publishing platform in its own right. In the past, you could only link articles/blogs to your actual website, unless you were a power user. However, now LinkedIn allows users to publish material on the social networking site for added convenience. This is fantastic news because people can actually recommend your content to others now.
Overall, there are three main reasons why social media (like LinkedIn) is so important for legal firms. First of all, the majority of business clients/prospects are already on LinkedIn so you don’t need to seek them out for yourself. Second, even if you decide not to use LinkedIn, your competition certainly will. This means that you are missing out hugely and are less likely to generate more web traffic to your site. That’s why LinkedIn so important as part of a wider content marketing strategy.

Twitter

Almost everyone is used to using Twitter and it has excellent opportunities for businesses who use it regularly and in a meaningful way. Companies who use Twitter generate twice the number of leads per month than companies who don’t. That’s a huge difference and proves that Twitter can be extremely financially effective. However, Twitter might be used less by companies than you actually think. The same survey found that only 53% of B2B businesses use the social media tool. This means that Twitter’s potential hasn’t always been fully exploited and that there’s a significant gap for legal firms to distinguish themselves amongst competitors.
Twitter is great for providing quick, instantaneous updates that have the potential to reach millions of users. Tools like ‘hashtags’ (#) are wonderful for increasing your public visibility and giving your business a relevant, contemporary edge. Moreover, Twitter is fantastic for ensuring that your business stays in the forefront of people’s minds. Nevertheless, there are limitations with Twitter. In terms of marketing content, it’s not simply enough to rely on Twitter to generate a meaningful relationship with clients. Twitter updates are easy to forget and are more useful for keeping people updated.

Google+

Although Google+ is definitely the new kid on the block in terms of the major social media platforms, it’s by no means worth sniffing at. Google+ has multiple benefits for businesses and is especially useful for legal firms. There are 4 reasons why every law firm should have their own Google+ account (and encourage its employees to do the same).
One of the great things about Google+ is that it allows users to create ‘Circles of Content’. This is a fantastic tool because it allows you to categorise your social circle around you. For legal firms, you are able to create ‘circles’ which can separate your clients, prospects, colleagues, and potential leads. This makes it much easier to target each group specifically and organise your marketing strategy.
Even more so, you can limit certain circles with regards to what content they can see from your company. Maybe you’ll want to tell your colleagues about a potential new lead you’ve found, without actually alerting it to the competition. The possibilities are really quite endless.

Social Media: The Neil Walker Digital Group way

At Neil Walker Digital Group, we believe that social media is a fantastic tool which allows businesses to build up their peripheral relationships especially. However, social media is particularly important because it allows legal firms to communicate on an international level at virtually no cost. This is a stark contrast to the realities of marketing some 10 years ago. For these reasons, we are a massive promoter of all the different platforms of social media.
Nevertheless, social media is only a worthwhile investment if you are willing to contribute the time and energy. Quite often, businesses will try Tweeting and experimenting with Google+ but will lose interest quickly. This is a time consuming task and requires constant updating to ensure that your customers are actually given valuable content.
This is what sets Neil Walker Digital Group apart from its contemporaries. We love managing social media and we have great resources to improve lead generation.

Metrics

With all of this in mind, then, there would be no point in content marketing if there was no quantifiable advantage to it. In terms of the metrics we’re interested in, here is a list which can be used to measure the success of a content marketing strategy:

Brand metrics – this is a way of assessing how much buzz is surrounding your brand. This generally tends to be an abstract concept but is still incredibly useful. One of the ways to measure this is through your social media status. Are more people talking about your company? Are people actively sharing your website? All of this closely ties in together with ‘reputation metrics’ and analysing how well-regarded your company is.
PR metrics – PR Metrics is a wide term which incorporates ‘lead generation metrics’ and subscriptions. This is an incredibly valuable method of examining how many more clients you have gained over a period of time. In this sense, perhaps PR metrics are also a measure of financial success.
Demographic metrics – your demographic measurements help to inform you about the types of customers you have and who you also need to target. This can be a useful way of finding out if your customer-base is changing and if you need to adapt your marketing strategy.
Search metrics – this is a way of assessing whether or not your website has received increased traffic. This is an important measurement because it lets you know how well your SEO strategy is working. While traffic isn’t always the best indicator of financial success, it is very useful for finding out if your content is resonating with audiences. Furthermore, it also gives an impression of to what extent you can be considered a thought-leader.
Social metrics – this is method of finding out how well your content is being received on social media websites. We can examine your total number of retweets, shares, comments, mentions, and all of the other platforms used for communicating via social media. This is also a vital indicator of assessing how your content marketing strategy is developing.

Within these metrics, there are several particular areas that we are interested in. This includes:

page views
new visitors
bounce rate
cost per lead

With these in mind, we believe that data collection and metrics are a vital way of assessing how successful a content marketing strategy is. At Neil Walker Digital Group, we love getting to the nitty-gritty of what make businesses tick.

So, why is Content Marketing essential for Legal Firms?

Throughout this piece, we’ve tried to inform you about content marketing and the fantastic potential it holds for the legal sector. While content marketing has been used for some time by some legal firms, we feel that it’s time for a change across the sector as a whole. The ultimate objective of content marketing should be to set your company apart from the rest; ensuring a competitive edge above your contemporaries.
A great content marketing campaign is about giving valuable, meaningful content that has a real use for clients and prospects. If you want to increase your web traffic and status as a thought-leader, then you have to distribute wonderful content. At Neil Walker Digital, we simply love creating content for our clients and we consider ourselves to be pretty good at it too.
There are various components of content marketing, as we’ve seen, but it isn’t an overly expensive task like it used to be. Gone are the days of extortionate marketing campaigns, we feel.
Finally, we do all of the hard work so that legal firms can get on with the core work that matters to them. It’s a collaborative effort and we’ll be there with you every step of the way.