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When potential clients are looking for answers to their legal questions, they will search online to learn about lawyers and law firms. They will do this well before they decide whether they need an attorney or legal advice. In order to showcase your skills as an attorney and answer their questions, you need to have a robust and concise content marketing strategy. Understanding content marketing is crucial to your law firm’s success.
What Is Content Marketing?
There are several different goals that you can pursue when you start considering how to develop your content marketing strategy. Overall, you want your online content to be valuable and engaging for your target audience. In order for your content strategy to be effective, it needs to establish expertise, brand awareness, and leadership.
Your content will reflect your firm’s practice areas, brand, target audience, and more. Where you choose to publish your content depends on where your target audience is going to look for their answers to their legal questions. However, you will likely utilize blogs, social media posts, videos, and other online platforms.
Every piece of content you share establishes your law firm as a leader in your practice areas. The right content builds trust with your potential clients and shows them that you are competent, knowledgeable, and trustworthy.
Understand Your Website’s Purpose
Remember that you ultimately want your potential clients to make it to your website no matter what platforms you use. As such, your website needs to be an excellent resource and contain certain elements that create a good foundation. Those most critical elements are education, promotion of services, trust, and a search engine optimization strategy (SEO).
Make sure your target audience is able to navigate your website and find the information they need. You may consider outsourcing your content marketing strategy to a third party. Digital marketing companies can assess, design, or redesign your website. They also have the resources to conduct an SEO audit to ensure your website is the way to get recognized by Google.
Remember that you ultimately want your content marketing strategy to pull in prospective clients. The actual conversion from potential client to Asheville client happens when they learn about your services. Without a great website, you will have a much harder time obtaining new clients.
Creating the Right Content for Your Clients
The content you create and share on your website needs to be high-quality and valuable to your prospective clients. In order to make the right content, you need to determine who your ideal client is, choose content focus areas, select the best platforms to post your content, and share your content through external sources.
Defining a Client Profile
In order to create the right content for your prospective clients, you first need to consider what sort of information is valuable to those individuals. Before you can do that, you need to know who your prospective clients are. Start by developing an ideal client persona. This will help you understand the types of people looking for your help. Include the following factors in your profiles:
- Age
- Location
- Financial situation
- Pain points
- Values
- Social media platforms
The more precisely you create the client profiles, your content will be more effective.
Choosing Focus Areas
Once you have your ideal client profile laid out, you can focus on determining which services those individuals will need from you. The answers will lie in your practice areas and areas of expertise. One of the most effective ways to highlight your focus areas is storytelling. You can provide examples of your work while complying with ethics rules to help prospective clients envision what you offer, how you work with clients, and how you are an expert in your focus areas.
Picking Platforms
After determining your target audience and choosing content focus areas, it is time to pick the social media platforms you want to share your content on. You also need to consider which websites your prospective clients visit for information and educational resources. When you create your content for those platforms, you will have a better chance of reaching those that need your services.
In terms of how you craft content for specific platforms, consider each platforms’ best practices. You will want to consider the preferred character count, image size, and the number of posts per day or week. In addition to the content itself, you will want to use SEO best practices and specifically and intentionally format your content for Google so that it can be easily found.
Sharing Your Work
In addition to posting content on your website and social media platforms, you need to learn about the advantages of guest posting and sharing your work. When you post your content on a well-read blog in your target audience’s areas of interest, you will be recognized as an expert in your field, and your prospective clients will learn more about how your services can help them.
Guest blogging is also crucial to your backlinking strategy. When other websites link back to your firm, your website’s authority improves, which can enhance your website’s search rankings. It can be easier than you think to secure writing opportunities on other blogs. Curators of high-quality blogs are always looking for expert content. So long as your content is well-written and establishes that you know what you are talking about, other blogs will welcome your writing.
Improve Your Content Marketing Strategies
Content marketing is one of the best ways to generate leads for your law firm. Even if your practice relies heavily upon networking, word of mouth, and referral sources, you need content marketing. It has a much broader reach than any other marketing or advertising.
More importantly, when your content marketing uses effective SEO, it provides organic search traffic to your website, which will help your website rank higher in Google search results. Overall, it can generate leads that become new clients, build trust in your target audience, and increase your visibility in your industry.
