3 Daunting Law Firm Content Marketing Tasks and How to Address Them

The worst marketing content is no marketing content.  If your law firm has an ugly website full of typos, more clients will still find your law firm and contact you than if you did not have a website at all.  Law firm marketing is not a popularity contest.  People become clients of your law firm because they need legal representation, not because you convinced them that hiring a lawyer is what all the cool people are doing or that you can make them rich.  If you have a website and you regularly add content to it, you are doing something right, but do you feel like the payoff is modest, given all the work that you put into creating marketing content?  The key to successful legal marketing content is to always look for ways to improve, but doing this requires you to steel yourself against embarrassment, frustration, and disappointment; it is no wonder lawyers procrastinate revamping their content marketing strategy.

Finding Out What Your Ideal Audience Needs

Some marketing firms will take your money and create a buyer persona, a composite character who supposedly embodies the characteristics of your ideal target audience; a famous example of a buyer persona is Becky, the soccer mom, the buyer persona of the Contemporary Christian radio format.  Buyer personas are of limited usefulness for law firms, though; they are stereotypes, not people, and while it may be possible to sell widgets to stereotypes, it is not possible to provide legal representation for them.

Instead, ask your real clients about information that you can use in your blog content.  No one likes a customer satisfaction survey, but this is not what you are doing.  Ask them what about the legal case surprised them the most, what misconceptions they held about the law, or what helped them cope with the stress of being a party to a lawsuit.  Use their answers as inspiration for blog posts, but don’t mention your clients or cases directly.

Updating Your Outdated Content

Not all of your content has to be evergreen; evergreen content is, at its worst, generic content.  You should, however, reread your practice area pages and change any out-of-date information.  It’s fine to keep blog posts the way they are, but if the laws have changed since you published the post, add a note at the top that says something like, “This post was first published in 2019.  The law referenced in this post was amended in 2023.”

Identifying the Weaknesses of Your Content Marketing Strategy

Getting an honest opinion about where you are going wrong with your marketing content or with your larger digital marketing strategy is not fun, but it is a necessary step toward improving your marketing content.  This is where it helps to hire a professional marketing firm, preferably one that focuses on law firms.

Get Your Strategy and Your Content From the Same Place

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Misconceptions Are an Opportunity for Law Firm Content Marketing

One of the most enjoyable parts of socializing with people whose professional backgrounds differ from yours is hearing their stories about their work, the things that make it fun and meaningful, and also the everyday annoyances that they can have a sense of humor about when describing them to an intellectually curious lawyer over cocktails.  By contrast, the fun of socializing with other lawyers is balking at how ignorant the public is about the law.  As the drinks flow, you giggle about consultations with prospective clients who did not know legal terms that you were sure that you learned about in high school Latin class, if they were not vocabulary words in middle school English class.  Of course, when clients come to your office, you don’t mock them or deride their ignorance; you explain the things that are relevant to their legal case, even if you think that those things are obvious.  Explaining simple legal concepts that you once assumed everyone knew, without sounding condescending, is a strategy for successful legal marketing content.

Use Your Blog to Teach Your Audience Something They Don’t Know, Even If You Think They Should Already Know It

A blog on your law firm website is an easy and effective way to make your website visible on Google searches and to persuade prospective clients of your knowledge and authority before they even fill out an online contact form to set up a consultation.  Of course, the hardest part of writing a blog is thinking of blog post topics, especially since frequently adding new posts is a cornerstone of law firm content marketing.  Where should you find enough blog topics so that your blog can keep your law firm’s website at the top of the search results page for law firms in your area?

An amateur response to this question is to look at the suggested terms that Google suggests when you start typing open-ended queries such as “Charleston car accident.”  The trouble is that Google will tell you what it is telling everyone else, not what people want to know but can’t easily find on Google.  A slightly more sophisticated response would be to base your blog posts on questions that customers frequently ask, such as, “How much money can I get for a car accident injury claim?”  Writing blog posts about these topics is a good idea because people who have not discussed their case with a lawyer will want to read them.  Of course, this only covers the questions that clients at initial consultations think to ask, the things that they know that they don’t know.  To level up your blog post ideas, write about the misconceptions that you had to clear up for clients, things that they thought they knew or did not even think to ask about.

Finding the Time to Write Blog Posts Is Another Matter Entirely

The professional law firm content marketers at Law Blog Writers, LLC will compose custom-written, informative blog posts for your law firm’s website, whether or not you supply the topics.

What Is Demand Generation, and Do Law Firms Have Any Use for It?

If you have ever learned about the ancient Athenian play The Frogs by Aristophanes, the part you heard about was the scene where Dionysus crosses a lake to the Underworld while the Greek chorus imitates the sound of frogs croaking; in Classical Greek, frogs say, “Brekekekeks koaks koaks” instead of “Ribbit ribbit.”  It is funny enough that the dialogue of a play thousands of years old included frog croaks, but an even more memorable scene in the play, not often described to students, is where Dionysus asks his brother Heracles for advice on the best way to get to the Underworld, and Heracles suggests leaping from a tower or drinking poison.  Dionysus wisely does not choose any of the options Heracles suggests.  Likewise, most of the possible ways that lawyers could increase demand for their services would not be desirable ones.  No one with any hope of maintaining a law license in good standing would suggest that personal injury lawyers should cause more accidents, family law attorneys should cause more divorces, probate lawyers should cause more family estrangement, or criminal defense lawyers should cause more crime.  In the world of content marketing, demand generation is a subtler matter, and law firms should apply a light touch when implementing it in their legal marketing content.

Demand Generation Is About Building Brand Recognition for Your Law Firm

If the phrase “demand generation” gives you the creeps, it is probably because of its similarity to “lead generation,” which, if you describe it to anyone outside the content marketing industry, does sound like a gray hat marketing tactic at best.  Certainly, lawyers don’t need to create splashy-looking websites with little in the way of informative content just to entice people to type their email addresses so that you can send them promotional offers.

That is not demand generation.  Instead, demand generation is about getting your name out there.  You have little control over who will need to hire a lawyer in your practice area and when they will need to hire one, but you can control whether your name pops into their head when they need a lawyer or have a legal question, as well as whether they recognize your law firm’s name when they Google generic legal questions or enter search terms like “estate planning lawyer near me.”  Search engine optimization (SEO) is a tried-and-true strategy for building name recognition; despite the constant barrage of new SEO gimmicks, you should stick to the tried-and-true strategies, such as updating your blog at least once per month and adding practice area pages for every subtopic of your practice area and every sizable city and town in your metropolitan area.  Demand generation can also take place offline, with billboard advertisements and sponsoring non-profit events so that your law firm’s name goes on the list of donors on the event’s website or on a banner at the event itself.

Custom Written Demand Generation Content for Law Firms

The professional law firm content marketers at Law Blog Writers, LLC can help you generate demand for your law firm through blog posts and content pages.