How to Prioritize Quality Over Quantity in Your Law Firm’s Marketing Content

If you cared more about style than about substance, you would not have chosen law as a profession.  Yes, you enjoy an elegant turn of phrase as much as anyone does, but you put so much time into doing your work that it does not leave much time for shameless self-promotion.  Besides, it is virtually impossible for lawyers to create a sudden and vast surge in demand for their services, at least without committing any violations of professional ethics or outright breaking the law.  By nature, law firm marketing is about quality rather than quantity.  Not everyone needs your services; it is great if people choose you when they need a personal injury lawyer, but it is better if the insurance company offers them a fair settlement on the first try, and better still if they do not get injured at all.  Therefore, the focus of your legal marketing content should be to make it easy for the people who need your services to find your website and your contact information.

Five Informative Practice Area Pages Are Worth 100 Blog Posts

The most important part of your law firm’s website is your name, address, and phone number (NAP).  If your site is simply your NAP with a clipart image of the scales of justice, it has accomplished more than 50 percent of its purpose, provided that your business name tells prospective clients what you do, such as “Bloggins & Associates Injury Lawyers” or “Bloggins Estate Law.”

Your website should, however, have enough content to persuade prospective clients that they want to hire you.  Create a practice area page for each type of case that you represent, for example, divorce, parenting plans, child support, and prenuptial agreements.  If each page tells readers everything they need to know to convince them that you can help them with their case, Google users will keep navigating to your site, and Google will keep sending them.  Adding blog content shows Google and your clients that you are still paying attention, but it is useless unless you have informative practice area page content.

Meet Your Target Audience Where They Are

Posting blog posts on your own website is nice, but you can reach a wider audience by posting content on sites where your target audience is likely to be reading.  If you are an estate planning lawyer, post guest posts on lifestyle websites for retirees.  If you are a family law attorney, post a guest post on a website for single parents.  Don’t worry about how authoritative the website is.  You bring the authority; the website is where you find the people who might need your services.

What If You Don’t Have Time to Focus on Quality or Quantity?

The professional law firm content marketers at Law Blog Writers, LLC will write practice area page content for your law firm’s website or blog posts for your own site or other sites where you plan to guest post your content.

Tap Into the Monomyth for Quick and Effective Law Firm Blog Content

If you are the parent of teenagers or young adults who are going through the “lawyers are the root of all evil” phase, you might be able to gain some perspective from rereading your writings from when you were their age.  You will probably find that you were just as short-sighted and as convinced of your own positions as they are now.  The experience might be disheartening, though, when you look at how big your vocabulary was and how light-hearted and full of surprises your writing style was, compared to now.  The writing you do in your capacity as a lawyer is downright boring and does not show your personality.  The good news is that your law firm’s blog is the ideal place to bring back symbolism, plot twists, and all the other things that made writing so much fun when you were in college.  You can showcase your knowledge of literary tropes in your legal marketing content, to the delight of Google and prospective clients alike.

There Is Only One Story, So Remix It for Your Blog

Folklorists, anthropologists, and literary theorists have proposed that there is only one story.  In other words, the same plotlines appear in folktales, myths, and epics from around the world, and novelists and screenwriters consciously or unconsciously repeat them.  Consider that the ancient Greek myth of Heracles and the medieval Arabic epic of Antara both involve a hero with superhuman strength performing a series of difficult tasks in order to reach his goal.  If you read the book The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, you will be able to identify the plot points of the “monomyth” in many movies you have seen.

As for your own blog content, it is possible to write blog posts that tell a story using any of the various ancient literary tropes.  Here are some examples:

• The hero’s quest – Describe the obstacles and helpful people you meet along the way when filing a personal injury claim or administering the estate of a deceased person.

  
  

• Unreliable narrator – Tell the story of a legal case or the effects of a law, and then at the end, reveal that the story has been told from the perspective of an unlikely narrator who knows less about the concept than the audience does.

  
  

• Underdog story – Tell the preferably true story of someone who was able to overcome adversity thanks to the area of law that you practice.

  
  

• Tragic hero – Tell the true or fictional story of someone whose apparently inevitable misdeed caused them legal trouble.

When you approach writing blog content as a creative writing exercise, it does not feel like work.  If you are so swamped with work that you do not have time to do anything fun, you can always outsource your blog content.

Professional Content Writers Have Writing Talent, Too

The professional law firm content marketers at Law Blog Writers, LLC will create custom-written, readable content that will hold the attention of your audience.

The Elements of Content Marketing Strategy

A recent post on the Content Marketing Institute site asked businesses to speculate about what they would do if they suddenly found enough room in their marketing budget to hire one additional employee.  Small law firms do not even have enough money in their budget to hire one person whose entire job is content marketing, so the idea of a law firm already having a marketing team and having a big enough budget surplus to hire an additional team member is preposterous.  Most of the time, small law firms create their digital marketing content in-house or outsource it on a freelance basis.  Despite this, the post resonates with law firms because, no matter how many people work together on content marketing and no matter the duration of their working relationship, content marketing is not one job but many.  If you, like most small law firms, must create your legal marketing content on a shoestring budget, you can do it more efficiently by thinking about which roles employees of your law firm can handle in-house and which ones you can afford to outsource.

Collecting and Analyzing Marketing Data

You can learn a lot about the Google search interests of your target audience just by typing search terms related to your practice area and seeing how Google auto-completes them, but this is an amateur strategy, to say the least.  Every serious effort at building a content marketing strategy requires at least a simple analytics software package.  If you have lots of free time on your hands, you can try to reverse engineer your competitors’ content marketing strategy; you can do this with analytics software, but also just by reading your competitors’ content carefully.

Setting Goals and Making Plans to Achieve Them

Simply writing blog posts and adding practice area pages to your law firm’s website is better than nothing, but content marketing is only effective if it begins with a strategy.  Assuming that you have enough people to do this, one person should collect data on the performance of your content and, if possible, that of your competitors, and someone else should review it.  Content strategists can also decide ways in which it is cost-efficient to diversify their marketing content with their current budget, such as by making podcast episodes or YouTube videos.

Drafting Online Content and Chatbot Wrangling

If you are so pressed for time that you enlist the help of chatbots to write your marketing content, this only makes you human.  Chatbots cannot be trusted to write law firm blog content unattended, though.  Giving them detailed instructions and proofreading their work takes time, almost as much time as writing the content yourself.  In fact, writing your own blog content might be faster than building in an additional step of having chatbots write a first draft.

You Don’t Have to Do It All

The professional law firm content marketers at Law Blog Writers, LLC can take on any aspects of your content marketing strategy that you need.