3 Steps for Lawyers to Get Started with Content Marketing

One of the aims of content marketing is to help you build familiarity and credibility in the eyes of your target audience - and to make it easier for them to reach out to you when they have a need. Think of how often you think of someone as an expert in an area because you have seen their content - both articles and social posts - on a regular basis.

To achieve this, there are a number of things to consider. You’ll need to have an approach framework in mind - a way in which you’re going to approach it all. We would regard the following pointers as a good guide: 

   1. Regular activity

To start with, you’re going to need to make a commitment. It doesn’t need to be much. Remember that people don’t/won’t read as much online, attention spans can be short. You can use this to your advantage - you don’t need to write a 20-page whitepaper - often a couple of paragraphs cutting right to the core of an issue will be enough. Set aside some time to respond to social media posts. 

   2. Engage with your audience

Add non-robot comments to posts in your area of expertise and interest. Be generous. Tag other relevant people in (see ‘Be helpful’ below). Don’t fall into the trap of trying to game algorithms and robotic-type answers. Most people can see through those very quickly. It just doesn’t feel real to them. Which brings us to:

   3. Be genuine, interested, and helpful (Think about how you make people feel)
Particularly on social media, but as a general rule. There’s a saying that people don’t really remember what people say, but they remember how they make them feel. Remember that everyone you are interacting with is a person; how can you engage in such a way that they are the center of the interaction; their problems; and how can you help. Sometimes it won’t be your content, but instead an introduction or passing a link to somewhere else. 

Below are the 3 steps to help you get started with your content marketing:

   1. Define and identify your audience

Defining your audience is the most important step for content marketing because you don't want to waste your time and efforts to distribute your content to a group of people who have almost no prospect of hiring you in the future. Start your content marketing strategy by defining the target audience of your contents, for example, age group (if the target is a person); profession (depending on the type of legal services that you/law firm can provide); Industry (if relevant); or Interests and likes. 

   2. Determine the channel and type of your content 

Ideally, your content should reach your audience through the platform they are most active. For example, if your audience is: 30 to 50 years old, entrepreneurs and business owners. The platforms which they’re active could be Twitter, Medium, and LinkedIn.

Here are some content types to consider: 

• Whitepapers (How To Write And Format a White Paper by Foleon)
• Podcast (How To Start a Podcast by Buzzsprout)
• YouTube Videos (3 Ways You Can Create Impactful Legal Marketing Videos on Smith by Robert Weiss)
• How-to guides (Legal and How-to Guides for Independent Creators, Internet Users, nonprofits, and small businesses by New Media Rights)
• Email marketing (10 Email Marketing Tips for Law Firms by Furiarubel)
• Being featured in third party content (e.g. Innovative Lawyer Series by Lexub)

Content topic

After choosing the type of your content, the next thing is to choose the content topic. So, this is where the personas you built comes into play. Your personas have different motivations, interests, and problems. Your content topic needs to respond to the problems of each persona you’ve listed. 

   3. Monitor your Content Marketing

Obviously, your content marketing should not just stop with creating and distributing - You need to measure how your audience is reacting or engaging with your content on different channels. For instance, you can use the following metrics to measure the performance of your content on different channels:

• On Social Media, like Facebook, Linkedin – Post Engagement, Post Reach, Post reaction, Page Likes/Followers, and Shares; etc.;
• E-mail – Open rate, Click rate, Response rate which you can see if you are using e-mail marketing tools, such as Mailchimp or SendGrid. 

By assessing the metrics, you will understand the ways on how you can improve your content marketing. After measuring their performance, throw away the content types or channels that do not work and focus more on the ones that work.

Remember that no one--no matter how talented and intelligent--starts out as an expert. So, forget your worries & just get started!

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