Whan to learn more about digital content marketing basics for law firms?
You are interested in implementing digital content marketing for your law firm and want to educate yourself on the topic?
Perhaps you are just a curious soul reading about digital content marketing!
No matter the reason, we’ve got you covered.
In this article, we will talk exactly about that: digital content marketing basics for law firms. We will look at what is digital content marketing, why is it important for law firms, what are the different types of digital content marketing that we can produce and what is a good digital content marketing strategy.
We have divided this article into different sections so you can better navigate to the section of your choice:
- What is digital content marketing?
- Why is digital content marketing important?
- Type of digital content marketing
- What is a good content marketing strategy?
- Takeaways
Let’s get started…
What is digital content marketing?
To start with our content marketing basics for law firms, we must define what is content marketing in the first place.
Digital content marketing is the process where you create and publish digital content with the objective to reach your target audience, increase your brand awareness, engage with prospects and increase your overall sales.
The Content Marketing Insitute defines content marketing as “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
The key element in this definition is that digital content marketing provides users with valuable and relevant content so to attract and retain an audience.
This makes for digital content marketing a powerful digital marketing tool to target audience and increase your chances of conversion.
By producing valuable digital content on your law firm’s website or online, users will find your information helpful and potentially useful in dealing with a legal situation or question.
You can build trust with your users.
With the right content marketing strategies, you can eventually have that user repeatedly on your website and eventually turn them into a paying customer.
Why is digital content marketing important?
Digital content marketing for law firms is absolutely crucial.
Digital content marketing is an important marketing tool as you are not reaching out to prospects or pitching them anything but having them come to you.
Prospects are coming to you attracted by your content.
They will be much more receptive to your offering than if you are pitching them something they don’t need.
They have no obligation to hire your law firm, they can just consume your content.
However, the more users consume your digital content, the more you become relevant for them.
Ultimately, if they need some legal services or support in the areas you focused on your content marketing, they will think of you and reach out to you.
Content marketing is absolutely fantastic.
It’s a long-term marketing strategy.
Your efforts today will not produce results today.
You will need to keep working at it.
It will take a lot of time, effort and resources to put together a good body of digital content and material geared to your target audience.
You’ll need to implement digital marketing techniques like SEO and social media marketing to promote and distribute your content.
In the long-run, it will pay off and you will see results.
You will see increased traffic to your website, more conversions, stronger relationship with your users and clients, you can connect better with them, they’ll consider you as the subject-matter expert and you’ll eventually increase your profitability.
Your law firm must have a content marketing strategy.
It’s a must!!
The question should be what type of content do you want to create to be successful.
Type of digital content marketing
Digital content marketing basics for law firms will not be useful if we do not discuss the type of digital content you should create.
You can create digital marketing for your law firm in different ways.
You can create digital content for social media platforms, in blogs, infographics on your website, videos and so on.
Any digital content you create, whether it is text-based, video-based, images, podcasts or other can be effective if done right.
Social media content marketing
Social media content marketing is one way for your law firm to create brand awareness.
You can reach billions of people depending on which social media platform you use.
Your content marketing efforts on social media is aimed directly at your audience.
You want to appeal to them and create social engagement.
Through your digital content marketing efforts on social media, you want to raise people’s awareness, give them a reason to interact with you and have them share your content.
Infographic content marketing
Infographics are really fun in breaking down a complex idea, study, report or subject into a small digestible visual depiction of the report.
The infographics will highlight key statistics, key facts, key content and combine it with a descriptive visual design in such a way that by scroll-reading, you can capture the essence of the message being conveyed.
Law firms can use infographics to share industry reports, trends, statistics and facts that their target clients would particularly enjoy and find useful.
It can be educational, it can be a fun depiction of an event or topic, it can be about your brand, it can be to market your services.
You can create infographics for any reason you can creatively imagine.
Blog content marketing
If we want to focus on digital content marketing basics for law firms and fail to stress the importance of blogs, we have failed in our mission!
Blogs are amazing for law firms.
Lawyers are experts in their specific area of practice.
They have knowledge.
They can guide people, help people, educate people and more.
With your law firm’s blog, you can achieve exactly that.
You can provide content about different legal areas, talk about your experience, case laws, give easy tips, guide your user through a particular challenge or opportunity, educate your users and so on.
Your blog will attract a lot of visitors to your website.
Why?
Simple.
People now tend to search online for legal-related information and content before reaching out to lawyers.
By providing useful and valuable legal content on your law firm’s blog, you can attract prospects looking to educate themselves on a legal topic.
Maybe they are just curious, and that’s ok.
Maybe they are starting a buyer’s journey and going through the awareness stage.
That’s great!
You want online users to find you, consume your content and potentially reach out to you.
Starting a blog may be easy.
Maintaining a blog is where it’s challenging.
You need to regularly publish content and make sure your material is up-to-date and useful.
If you keep your blog active, then users can trust the information more than if they see old and out-dated posts.
Video content marketing
Video content marketing can also be an interesting approach for digital content marketing.
The sheer number of online users watching videos on YouTube and other channels makes it important for any law firm to consider.
If you can create video-based digital content marketing, you can create a much closer connection with your prospects.
They can see you on the video and connect with you.
That’s an amazing way to reach out to users and create trust with you and your brand.
According to HubSpot, over 50% of consumers say they see videos from the brands they interact with.
If you understand the typical consumer behaviour and find a way to leverage that in your law firm’s digital content marketing, you can produce great results.
People do not retain the services of a lawyer the same way they shop for a product online but there are online consumer behaviour patterns that are similar.
Using video content marketing to your advantage can be quite interesting.
What is a good content marketing strategy?
To succeed in digital content marketing, you will need to approach it just like any other project.
You need to define your goals, decide how you will execute your strategy, execute it and then track your performance.
Let’s look at the different steps in your digital content marketing strategy.
Define your goals
You’ll need to set your law firm’s goals.
Having a clear direction is important.
You want to ensure you produce content in a coherent and strategic way as opposed to spontaneously writing about different things.
Each law firm will have its own unique goals to achieve.
You should take into consideration your areas of practice, your lawyer’s expertise and knowledge, the type of customers you want to target, the type of content that will appeal to them and what is it that you want to ultimately achieve.
Are you looking for brand awareness?
Do you want to have more email subscribers?
Do you want to focus on a new legal area of practice?
Do you want to target a niche market?
Do you want to create engagement with your audience?
Do you want more conversions?
Once you have thoroughly reflected on your objectives and goals, you should also determine your KPI’s on how you will measure your success.
Once your KPI’s are also set, you move to the next step.
KPI’s will help you measure your performance and success.
It’s a good way to steer yourself in the right direction and ensure you are going to meet your goals.
Choose the type of content to produce
Once you’ve defined your goals and KPI’s to measure your success, you will need to choose the type of content you will produce and in which channel you will produce them.
How should you decide on the type of digital marketing content to create?
The answer is both simple and complex.
It’s simple because you need to create content to attract your target audience.
It’s complex because you need to know what your audience is looking for.
If you are a business lawyer in New York, you’ll need to ask yourself what are people looking for online related to business law in New York.
You should ask questions like:
- What do people want to know about business law in New York?
- Are people looking for ways to deal with business challenges?
- What are people looking for when they need a business lawyer?
- What do people even think about what a business lawyer can do?
You have to go through this process and understand your ideal customer’s mindset.
Once you’ve identified your customers’ persona, you can create content targeting their needs, their questions and challenges.
You will then need to decide which online channel you will use to target your customers.
Will you write content on your website?
Will you write content on social media platforms?
Will you do podcasts?
How are you going to deliver the information you have produced to your target audience?
For law firms, legal blogs are one excellent way to achieve that.
By creating a blog, you are essentially creating a channel directly on your own website.
If users are interested in your material and decide to retain your services, you can provide them with links and navigation options to easily contact you.
Publish your content
The next step in defining the most amazing digital content marketing content to create is to publish your content.
This is where you need to be disciplined.
You need to produce content on a regular basis.
Producing content regularly and sharing it regularly can help build user confidence and engagement.
If your audience can rely on the fact that they will get great material from you on a weekly basis or bi-weekly basis, they’ll be happy to read what you publish and share.
If you do not have a disciplined approach in publishing content, you want to make sure that you go back to your goals and revisit what’s important for you.
Succeeding with digital content marketing requires time, effort and patience.
You need to produce content on a regular basis.
Not only good content but great content.
Your users should find it relevant and useful.
If you can publish amazing digital content on a regular basis, you will be on your way to great results.
Monitor and track your success
You’ve figured out what your goals are, you defined your customer persona, you decided on the type of content you will write, where you will publish your digital content and you are publishing regularly.
Now what?
The next important factor in digital content marketing basics for law firms is to monitor and track your results.
You want to know where you are heading.
You’ve put out amazing content, according to you.
Does your audience also think that you have an amazing content?
Are you getting user engagement with your content?
Are you getting more traffic to your website?
Are people sharing your content?
How is your month-over-month performance?
You want to know precisely what is working and what is not.
With regular tracking and monitoring of your digital content marketing results, you can bank on your successes and tweak the areas that are not working as intended.
There are many tools out there to do this.
One famous tool is Google Analytics.
With Google Analytics, you can track all the activity on your website and assess if you are on the right track or not.
Takeaways
Here you have it, digital content marketing basics for law firms.
In this article, we’ve discussed digital content marketing and ways you can incorporate that into your law firm’s digital marketing plans.
We have looked at what is digital content marketing, how to decide what to content to write about and where to publish your content.
For your law firm to succeed, you must incorporate digital content marketing into your overall marketing efforts and give it time to produce results.
Digital content marketing is a long-term commitment and can be quite lucrative if it’s planned the right way and executed properly.
We hope that you enjoyed this article on digital content marketing basics for law firms.
Do you have any comments to share with us about digital content marketing for law firms? We would love to hear from you. Drop us a comment!
