When it comes to content marketing, some lawyers are rather vocal with their distaste for “blogging”.

It’s not uncommon to hear statements like:

“I don’t know what topics to write about regularly.”

“But our industry is boring.”

“But have you seen my calendar?”

“I’m already up to my neck with tasks.”

“But it’s not billable.”

“We bought some articles from Fiverr and they did nothing.”

All I hear are objections, objections, objections! 😜

So today I’d like to make a case for Content Marketing.

You see, Content Marketing, when done right, is one of the most powerful tools you can leverage to generate high-quality leads and legal clients (almost on autopilot).

Here’s an example below of a family law firm in Sydney and the impact content marketing has had on their growth.

But how do you do it right?

Well, to give you an example…

One particular blog article I wrote generated plenty of leads, one of which turned into a client so happy with our performance that they stayed with us for more than 4 years.

(I’d like to think they stayed with us because of our winning personality, but I guess it also helped that we increased their monthly traffic by 1915% and their monthly revenue by 4361% in that time period).

But that article didn’t start out as the high-ranking, traffic-sucking, lead-generating money machine that I speak of.

Actually, when I first wrote its earliest version, I wrote it more for Google’s algorithm.

It did rank and it pulled in a decent amount of traffic, but the visitors were bouncing like crazy.
Nobody was commenting and nobody was enquiring about our services.

So while it was a high-performing article traffic-wise, in terms of leads and sales it was a dismal failure.

(Typical example of the uselessness of vanity metrics like “monthly number of visitors”).

So I made certain changes. Instead of trying too hard to appeal to Google’s SEO bots, I wrote it more for humans.

But not just any humans. I wrote it for my dream clients.

I listed all the questions they were actually asking, and then I gave them honest (probably too honest!), no fluff, no B.S. answers.

I made things lighthearted and entertaining, yet also straight to the point.

The result? One of the many leads from that single article alone turned into a client with a 6-figure lifetime customer value.

Such is the power of Content Marketing.

If you want to do the same for your law firm, keep reading because that’s exactly what I will show you in this content marketing article series.

What is Content Marketing?

Content Marketing is the creation, distribution, and promotion of useful content that attracts your ideal clients to your marketing funnels and turns them into leads.

Ultimately, your law firm’s content marketing should help drive customer actions that lead to open cases and increased revenue.

Your content can be any or a combination of these types:

• Articles, blog posts
• Videos
• Ebooks or Guides
• White Papers
• Emails
• Case Studies
• Podcasts (your own or as a guest in someone else’s podcast)
• Checklists
• Press Releases
• Infographics
• Diagnostic quizzes
• Educational Graphics
• Webinars
• Social media posts

Creating strategic content consistently helps establish your authoritativeness and credibility — not just in the eyes of your prospects but in the eyes of Google and your peers, as well.

One of our clients, Gibbs Wright Lawyers, demonstrates their understanding of this on their blog:

Why Do Content Marketing For Your Law Firm?

A sound Content Marketing strategy can help your law firm achieve the following:

• Magnetise your ideal prospects at the right time.
• Generate leads by having your content funnel qualified traffic to your lead capture forms.
• Outrank your competitors on Google.
• Rank higher in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for the right keywords. By “right keywords” I mean high-value, high-traffic keywords used by prospects with high buying intent.
• Attract more and more of the right kind of prospects to your website over time.
• Provide so much valuable information to your prospects that your content establishes you not just as an expert but a thought leader in your field.
• Build trust and credibility, and thus strengthen your brand and increase brand awareness.
• Cut through the noise in the marketplace and enhance your visibility online.

Therefore, now more than ever —useful, relevant content is an essential component of a successful digital marketing strategy.

So if you’re serious about building a solid digital marketing engine that generates leads and sales for your law firm, then Content Marketing is one of the most effective long-term investments you can make.

Sure, it’s labour-intensive and it could take some time before you see substantial results, but the benefits far outweigh the costs.

Content can potentially impact all parts of your marketing and sales funnels because it can affect your organic traffic, search ranking and contribute heavily to your lead generation efforts.

Besides, your competitors are already doing Content Marketing. So if you don’t do it well or as often as they are doing it, then you could run the risk of appearing less knowledgeable (and therefore less credible) than they are.

“Consumers are looking for content that they can connect, engage, and benefit from. Some people find targeted ads creepy so they resonate with content more.”
~ Cristy Garcia, VP of Marketing of Impact.com

How To Craft A Content Marketing Strategy That Gets Leads and Wins Clients

So now you can just go ahead and create content, correct?

Well, not so fast.

Remember that an effective plan focuses on delivering content that addresses your ideal prospects’ questions and concerns.

And you also want to make it serve your business, of course.

That’s what I call WIN-WIN.

And this is why there are other things you need to clarify first.

Step 1. Answer These Questions Before Crafting Your Content Marketing Strategy

There are 4 things you need to get clear on:

1. Your Ideal Clients
   Who are they, what their pain points are, etc.
2. Your Services, Messaging and Brand
   What are your offers and how well do they align with your ideal clients’ needs?
3. Your Marketing Funnel
   What is the client journey you ought to design for them, given your marketing goals?
4. Your Target Content
   Given the answers to the previous three considerations, what keywords should you target and what content would be most effective for you to use?

Let’s tackle each in more detail…

Your Ideal Clients

Think about the actual clients you work with that you’d love to get more of.

How did they find you?

What were their “buying criteria” and what ultimately “sold” them into hiring your firm?

With these in mind, ask yourself:

• Who are my ideal client personas?
  (To make them more real, give each persona a name).
• What’s their demographic profile (age, race, education, income, employment, gender, location)
• Their psychographics (values, interests, lifestyle, beliefs, motivations)?
• What do they want (that I can help them with)?
• What problems and pains do they have (that my offers solve)?
• What myths do they believe, what assumptions and blind spots do they have (that my content should address, in order to help them move forward)? criteria and how do they evaluate their options and make their decisions (when it comes to hiring a lawyer)?

If you are a lawyer who can help with estate planning and wills, here’s a sample persona profile you might come up with:

If you’re a commercial lawyer, a persona you might decide to target is:

Your Services, Messaging & Brand

• What services do I want to focus on selling more of?
• How do I want to position our law firm?
• What’s our Unique Value Proposition and how can I make it stronger?
• What are our strengths — and how do I amplify those in our positioning?
• What are our weaknesses — and how do I make those irrelevant?
• What reputation do I want to build in the marketplace?
• What marketing goals do I want my content to help achieve?
• What has worked well for us historically (where do your ideal clients have been coming from)?
• How can I best demonstrate why my services are superior, and why we are their best bet?

Your Marketing Funnel

When it comes to your marketing funnel, the most important thing to understand is how you’re going to match your content to your ideal prospect’s way of thinking.

And their way of thinking depends on what stage they are in their buying journey.

There are 5 stages your prospects go through:

1. Unaware
   They don’t yet know they have a problem.
2. Problem aware
   They know they have a problem but they’re not necessarily aware of how (or the best way) to solve it. They don’t know what their options are. They don’t know who can help them.
3. Solution aware
   They’ve done their research and they’re now aware of feasible solutions that are right for them. They may or may not be actively looking for all possible solutions. They may be aware of some solutions but they may be procrastinating (depends on how big/intense their pain is)
4. Product/Brand aware
   These are people who know they have a problem, they know of many potential solutions, and (most importantly) they know about YOU + your solution. They may or may not have shortlisted you.
5. Most Aware
   These are your hottest leads. They know their problem well, they know of many possible solutions, they know about you and your services, and they’re seriously considering you as their best option.

Now that you understand the 5 stages in the Buyer’s Journey, ask yourself:

• Looking at our current sales process, what’s effective and what’s not working?
• How do I want to capture our leads and what’s the best way to nurture them?
• How can I filter out prospects whom we can’t, won’t or don’t want to serve?
• What useful, value-packed “freebie” can I offer them so they’ll happily give me their emails and/or phone number? (How can I make that freebie so remarkable that it will make me stand out from everyone else?)
• What “buying journey” would best align with our ideal prospects given the way they make their buying decisions?

Your Target Content

After clarifying all the nuances surrounding your offer, your target clients, and your funnel, now you are ready to create the content that aligns with all those.

So ask yourself:

• What are the questions each of my target personas tend to ask (considering each stage of their awareness)?
• What keywords are each of my target personas using at each stage of their journey and how do I cater to those?
• What useful, high-value “freebies” (we call them lead magnets) might they want, considering the issues they’re grappling with?
• What content type are they more likely to favour/consume?
• What are the top topics (and subtopics) I should cover, to make them understand their problem?

Step 2. Understand What a Smart Law Firm Content Marketing Strategy Involves

Phase 1: Groundwork

1. Research
   Find out what keywords your ideal prospects actually use when searching information about their legal problems. You also need to know which hot topics you have not written about yet.
2. Strategy & Planning
   The more you leverage data to shape the content you publish, the more useful and helpful your prospects will find your content. This in turn will make it easier to convert your readers into warm leads.

Phase 2: Creation

1. Content Creation
   Create the most suitable content that addresses your target personas’ questions and concerns at each stage of their buying cycle.
2. Publication
   Know which platforms will get your content seen and consumed by the most number of your ideal client profile.

Phase 3: Distribution
This involves promotion and syndication of your content.

Content creation is half the battle. Driving eyeballs to your content comes next.

Phase 4: Tracking
This involves evaluating how well your content is contributing to the accomplishment of your business goals. You will want to know:

• Which content is pulling the most traffic (and why — so you can replicate its results).
• Which content is converting the most readers into actual leads.
• Which types or formats are most effective at driving the desired actions.

Phase 5: Optimisation
Depending on what you discover during the Distribution and Tracking phases, your content optimisation may involve revisiting, updating or repurposing your content.

Step 3. Understand how you can use each type of content to achieve your business goals.

Here are examples of how to use types of content to achieve specific marketing goals:

Step 4. Do a Content Audit

Now that you’ve done steps 1 to 3, you’re ready to do a Content Audit.

What is a Content Audit?

A content audit is the analysis of all the content you’ve published on your website so far. The main goal is to identify their weaknesses and strengths so you can create a content action plan for the next months that will drive your marketing goals forward.

Depending on what you discover, this action plan may involve updating, creating, repurposing, or deleting some content.

Why should you conduct a Content Audit?

• To identify opportunities where you can provide more high-value content that resonate with your ideal clients.
• When you audit, you will often find broken links, see content that are now irrelevant, some errors on the execution of your pages, etc. This gives you an opportunity to fix them, which helps optimise the user experience.
• To improve your website’s reach and effectiveness.
• By understanding what your ideal prospects are searching for (that you haven’t written about yet), you’ll be able to cater to their needs better. This will help you not only rank better in the SERPs (Search Engine Results pages) but more importantly help attract highly qualified leads.

According to SEMrush’s State of Content Marketing 2022 Global Report:

• 65% of companies that succeed in content marketing run content audits more than twice a year.
• 46% of companies whose content marketing was unsuccessful in 2021 never run content audits.

Bottom line: if you’re not running content audits, you might be missing out.
In fact, when respondents were asked to share their results after updating their content following an audit, they revealed:

What to include in your content audit?
Everything.

This includes blog articles, your social media posts, your videos on YouTube, your email sequences, guest posts (if any), your “freebies”, white papers, case studies, testimonials, press releases, etc.

You want to identify what else you need to publish and how they could be made better.

“Auditing and pruning your existing content is one of the most effective ways to increase engagement, rankings and traffic without having to spend additional resources on new content.”
~ SEMRUSH

How We Conduct A Content Audit For Our Law Firm Clients

A content audit helps us to determine the actions and types of content required to achieve your goals.

Step 1. We clarify your goals and KPIs.

We’ll collaborate with you to clarify what your focus is and what you want to achieve within the next 6 to 12 months so that we can tailor a content strategy that suits your business objectives.

Step 2. We conduct a Content Inventory.

We’ll collate all your existing content in one place so you won’t have to do the tiresome work of going through every page of your site.

We may also include offline content, emails, any videos you have, and social media posts.

In the end, we’ll have a spreadsheet of all your content (organised by content type) showing the URL, meta title, H1s, meta description, target keywords, and any other pertinent information.

The inventory will allow us to:

• Spot which content are missing certain elements (e.g., those not applying SEO best practice)
• Highlight which content is evergreen and which is possibly outdated or obsolete.
• Clarify what purpose you are trying to achieve with each.
• Identify which content is catering to which of your target personas (and if you have enough content for each persona).
• Pinpoint which content is addressing the concerns of ToFus, MoFus, and BoFus (and if you have enough content for each stage of awareness).
• Assess whether your internal links and outbound links are adequate and identify linking opportunities.
• Identify duplicate content, if any.
• Identify dead or obsolete links.
• Depending on the situation, we might also look at your load speed, mobile optimisation, and site security.

To do all these, we start by…

Evaluating Your Site’s Existing Content

In order to create new content that will help drive your growth, we first need to understand what does and doesn’t work on a site.

So we look at your current content’s performance indicators:

• The current traffic going to the pages
• The number of conversions
• The impressions the page is getting
• The clicks it is getting
• The number of keywords
• The highest rankings achieved

Each of these metrics can tell us potential ways the content may need to be optimised. For example:

• If a page is ranking on numerous keywords but is not ranking on any terms in the top ten positions, we check how many of these keywords are relevant. If there are some highly relevant ones, it would be good to see if you can strengthen that content.
• If a page is ranking on numerous keywords but not many of them are relevant, we assess how valuable the page is. (Remember that high traffic doesn’t always indicate success. Just because certain pieces are getting traffic doesn’t mean it’s the right traffic. Therefore, it’s important to understand what content is relevant to your service/goals. So look at the existing content in terms of relevancy. Evaluate if your high traffic pages could be attracting bad leads or irrelevant traffic.)
• If a page is ranking on a few keywords but only a couple in the top ten positions, we evaluate if there are other keywords (potentially long tail keywords) that you could incorporate in the piece to strengthen the authority of the piece.
• If a page is receiving high impressions but has a low click through rate, then the meta descriptions and titles might need to be optimised.
• We can also delve deeper into specific pages by using tools like Surfer SEO to measure the effectiveness of any page on your website.
• We also look at content duplication. Longer content pieces that are well written, relevant, and answer questions that people have are going to show more authority and perform better.

So if there are multiple pieces covering a topic, we can look at the performance of these pieces and see if there’s an effective way to update one of them to incorporate the information covered in the other pieces.

Step 3. Data collection and analysis.

Using Google Analytics, we’ll identify how your current content is performing in terms of metrics such as traffic, engagement, clicks, SEO, etc.

The main questions we want to answer are:

• Which content is lacking SEO best practice?
• Which content is underperforming and why?
• Which needs revising or updating?
• Identify any repurposing opportunities that we can do quickly and easily.
• Which are the top performers and how can we replicate their exemplary results?

Doing all these will allow us to…

Identify Gaps in Your Content

We evaluate your current content against your goals and priorities.

We find the gaps you have on the site and formulate a content strategy and topics that we’ll need to cover next.

One of the most effective ways to identify the gaps is by doing a Keyword Gap Analysis.

The keyword gap analysis compares the keywords your site currently ranks for with those that your competitors are also ranking for. You can see terms where you’re not ranking at all or where you’re being outranked.
Working with you, we’ll identify which areas are keyword targets and a priority for your law firm and your goals. You can then see how other sites have targeted these keywords and potentially use these as inspiration and ways to create new pages, articles and content for your site.
Keyword gap analysis is great for idea generation. Not only will you be able to identify keyword gaps but also see the various methods and page types other people have tried.

Step 4. Draft a Content Action Plan for the next 6 months and update your marketing strategy accordingly.

After analysing your content, we’ll be able to list specific actions that can be taken for each content piece.

A six-month action plan is long enough to give us enough time to work on the strategy and yet short enough to also let us test whether what we’re doing is effective and efficient. If we’re not having the desired impact, then we can course-correct immediately.
Your action plan could include the need to:

• Improve existing content.
• Create new service or site pages.
• Create content to add to existing pages or create a plan for new content. (Usually, after a content audit, action plans involve a little bit of all of these).

BOOK YOUR FREE SEO AUDIT TODAY.

Content Marketing Strategy Best Practices for Law Firms: A Checklist

• Write “evergreen” content that answers your target clients’ questions. Evergreen content is not time-sensitive so they remain relevant for years.
• Focus on writing topics about your specialty. Aim to be the top resource for that topic. Comprehensive, persona-focused guides are perfect for this.
• Ensure your content is optimised for mobile (smartphone and tablet) users.
• Play to your strengths. You don’t need to write articles if you find it easier and more enjoyable to shoot videos.
• Repurpose your content. You can transcribe your videos and use that as raw material for new articles, checklists, infographics, branded graphics, etc.
• Book a time of the month solely for updating your already published content. This is especially important if there are any recent law changes that need to be mentioned on your content.
• Everyone in your firm has something useful they can contribute so make it part of everyone’s job. Think of ways you can make it easy and fun for everyone.
• Have a formal process for Content Marketing, make it clear who is responsible for which part, and then document everything.
• Focus on increasing the quality of your content first before you scale for quantity. This means improving how you personalise it to your target personas’ specific concerns.
• ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu: Consider the different stages of awareness of your prospects and align your content with their psychology.
• Track the performance of your content. The metrics to monitor are organic traffic, search rankings and leads . Know which content is contributing to these three metrics, and which are not making any impact at all.
• Conduct a content audit.

Book Your Content Audit Today

As the marketplace gets more fierce, and as it gets tougher than ever to stand out among the sea of lawyers competing for the top spots, more and more law firms are beginning to understand the need for content marketing that increases their prospects’ awareness, establishes their authority and credibility, and produces higher quality leads.

If you want to do it better than everyone else and you’re prepared to play the long game, let’s talk. There will be no hard sell, no sales pitch — just an honest exploration of how we might be able to help you execute a content marketing strategy that will differentiate your law firm and generate a steady stream of highly qualified leads.

[BOOK YOUR FREE AUDIT HERE]