How to Build a Successful Content Marketing Strategy When Your Client Base Is Flat Broke

Some lawyers’ jobs are one economic downturn away from oblivion.  If your job is to draft real estate sales contracts, prenuptial agreements, and collaborative divorce agreements for folks in the Hamptons or in Beverly Hills, you are in a more vulnerable position than you think, even though your clients pay you so much that, if push comes to shove, you can just retire and move somewhere cheaper.  That is not the world where most lawyers live and work.  If your job is to contest unfairly denied Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) claims or to tell clients that it is inevitable that they will have to sell their late parents’ house during probate due to Medicaid estate recovery laws, you don’t have to wait for things to get worse before you and your clients begin feeling the financial strain.  Bankruptcy lawyers rank highly among practice areas where an initial consultation is most likely to include the words, “If I could afford that, I wouldn’t need to hire you.  For bankruptcy lawyers and others with a low-income client base, legal marketing content is less about persuading your clients to part with their nonexistent money and more about building a reputation for being knowledgeable and helping your target audience save money.

A Good Reputation Is Priceless, Even When No One Can Afford Your Hourly Fees

Conventional wisdom says that the goal of law firm marketing is to get Google users to visit your site, fill out an online contact form, schedule a consultation, and start paying you to represent them in their legal case.  If bankruptcy lawyers built their strategy that way, they would miss out on a large segment of their audience, the ones who already know that they can’t afford to hire a lawyer.

Bankruptcy lawyers should focus on building a website that enables visitors to complete the bankruptcy filing process on their own.  Include how-to guides in written and video form; bankruptcy can happen to anyone, from old fogeys who like written lists to digital natives who prefer to get information from videos.  As with any kind of video marketing content; someone out there just got a horrifying bill and wants to watch a 90-second video about filing for bankruptcy before getting back to work on gigs to earn money to pay down the bill, while someone else has fallen behind on a mortgage and is trying to choose between bankruptcy, surrendering the house to the bank, or both; this person wants a 20-minute video with greater detail.  As with any practice area, you need an FAQ page.  One of those questions should be about when it is advisable to hire a bankruptcy lawyer.  The complex cases that need you will hire you, while the simple cases will represent themselves in bankruptcy court, but don’t hesitate to end your video by asking them to write a positive review of you online if they found your video helpful.

Law Firm Marketing Content for Bankruptcy Lawyers and More

The professional law firm content marketers at Law Blog Writers, LLC can create valuable website content for lawyers in any practice area.

What Is the Role of Short Form Content in Your Law Firm’s Content Marketing Strategy?

College professors who teach freshman writing classes can sometimes tell which students are destined for law school because the fact that the class requires the students to write a term paper of upwards of 20 pages does not faze them.  Many people, if not most, are averse to long texts.  For every person who reads long novels for fun, there are at least ten who, since they graduated from high school or college, have never read anything longer than a Wikipedia article; instead, they scroll quickly through social media feeds and don’t click on anything that looks like it would be too time-consuming.  This is not the case with lawyers.  You only got to where you are now by carefully reading pages and pages of legal codes and court decisions and drafting lengthy legal briefs and memorandums.  It can be hard to shift gears when creating marketing content.  Your legal blog content, aimed at prospective clients, should certainly be shorter than the things you write for an audience of lawyers and judges, but just how short should it be?

Short Form Blog Posts Are Essential for Top of Funnel Google Searches

In a recent post on Search Engine Land, Julia McCoy extols the virtues of short-form content.  In the context of blog posts, she considers anything less than or equal to 1,000 words in short form.  She says that too many businesses chase the elusive goal of creating 1,500-word or 2,000-word posts week after week, leading to content that is uninformative, repetitive, and bloated with filler.

Long-form content has its place on law firm websites, but not on their blogs.  The purpose of your blog is to help prospective clients find quick, understandable information about common legal questions; ideally, readers should reach your blog posts by following a snippet.  Five hundred words is just the right length for a law firm blog post.  Save the long-form content for your practice area pages and FAQ pages.

Social Media Posts and Short Form Videos: Do Law Firms and the Short Attention Span Generation Need Each Other?

Some businesses build their marketing strategy around social media and video marketing.  McCoy gives the example of an eight-second video clip of a baby rhinoceros, which has turned out to be the San Diego Zoo’s most lucrative piece of video marketing content ever.  Of course, law firms don’t have adorable baby rhinos to boost their visibility, but with video content, shorter is better.  Across industries, the most viewed marketing videos are the ones that do not exceed three minutes.  As for social media, law firms should try out one social media platform at a time instead of spreading their efforts across multiple platforms.

Law Blog Writers, LLC Delivers Content of Any Length

Your law firm doesn’t need baby rhinos, even though having some around would be nice, but it does need high-quality marketing content.  Law Blog Writers, LLC provides custom-written law firm marketing content of any length you choose.

Content Marketing Isn’t a Panacea, but a Content Marketing Strategy Can Help You Think More Deeply About Your Goals for Your Law Firm

The first rule of writing is “know your audience,” and this applies just as much when you are writing blog content for your law firm as it does when you are writing a political campaign speech or a novel.  Content marketers often feel overwhelmed when they receive requests for content from businesses where everything is going wrong because the decision makers at the company keep sending mixed signals to each other as well as to their target audience.  If writing content for a business that doesn’t know what it wants is a challenge for professional content marketers, it is even more of a challenge to write content for your own law firm when it is struggling to define its own mission.  When you discuss a comprehensive content strategy with professional content marketing writers, you will get more than just legal blog content; you will get clarity that enables you to focus on one goal at a time.

Your Content Marketing Should Only Make Promises You Plan to Keep

In a recent post on her website, content marketer Lauren Pope compared the feeling of trying to write marketing content for troubled businesses to the feeling of trying to be everything, everywhere, all at once.  Even if you write factually accurate, engaging content, your content may help the company rank for certain keywords, but it will not bring in the new clients and, therefore, the revenues that the business needs.  The business will continue treading water, and if the content marketer doesn’t point out that the business has bigger problems than just its marketing strategy, it will slash its content marketing budget the next time the bills come due.  On the other hand, if you do speak up about the non-marketing-related problems you perceive, the client may take offense.

Working with content marketers can be a soul-searching process for law firms.  You should focus on targeting your content toward one type of case at a time; think of it as a separate series of blog posts.  You might find that you have fallen victim to a common problem among small and solo law firms, namely practicing “door law,” where you take on every case about which a prospective client contacts you, spreading yourself thin and getting overwhelmed in the process.  Content marketing research can help you identify the types of legal services that clients in your community need the most.  Focusing your content marketing strategy can help you set manageable goals for your law firm.

Law Blog Writers, LLC Does More Than Just Write Blog Posts

If you are juggling multiple responsibilities at a small law firm, it only makes sense to outsource your law firm blog writing.  The professional law firm content writers at Law Blog Writers, LLC can help you develop a content marketing strategy and then implement it with blog posts and other types of marketing content.