Finding the Right Content Marketing Strategy Is Tough, but Here Is How You Can Be Resilient About It

The fact that there are so many companies out there trying to sell you a quick fix for content marketing should tell you that there are lots of other people in the same boat as you, trying to find effective ways to spread the message about their businesses. It should also tell you that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Dropping f-bombs on YouTube might work if you are trying to sell a multilevel marketing business opportunity that caters to fitness bros (as opposed to the ones that cater to church ladies), but it doesn’t work for law firms. In fact, not all law firms need the same content marketing strategy. The only way to find the strategy that works for you is trial and error, which takes a lot of resilience. It always helps to post legal blog content on your website on a regular basis, but what you post and how often you post it will have to change over time.

Play the Long Game

According to Gina Balarin of Content Marketing Institute, successful content marketing is a moving target and the key to success is not getting too discouraged by disappointing performance of your content or by criticism of your work. You should think of content marketing as a two-way conversation with your audience. If something gets a good reception, you should continue doing it for as long as the good reception lasts, but don’t get too set in your ways or become sure that you have found the one and only perfect formula for content marketing.

Don’t Rush Into Business Deals With Marketing Firms

Most small law firms do not have the budget to hire a full-time content marketing staff, nor do lawyers and paralegals have a lot of time to devote to creating marketing content. Outsourcing your content marketing is a wise choice, but start small. Start by hiring marketing firms for individual projects of modest size. This way, you will be able to try out the content of several firms before you make a big investment. If you rush into a long-term agreement too soon, you will end up basing your decisions on protecting your business deal and not on getting the best content.

Think of Poor Outcomes as Moving the Search for the Right Strategy Forward

Remember that experimentation is a process, and that in order to find out what works, you must find out through experiencing what doesn’t work. If a piece of content does not perform well, you will know to do something different next time. It is easier to do this when you haven’t already paid a content marketing firm to produce dozens of other pieces of content like it.

Start With Professionally Researched and Professionally Written Legal Blog Content

When looking for content marketing firms, start with one that works exclusively with law firms. The legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will help you find a content marketing strategy that works well for your law firm.

How Search Engines Define Readability

For human readers, readability is a somewhat indescribable quality of texts. It is hard to say what made you want to keep reading a text, whether it was a book you found on the bookshelf at your uncle’s house and just couldn’t put down until you finished reading it or a piece of longform journalism that you read all the way to the end at a coffee shop down the street from your office before work, despite that it was about a subject you had never considered interesting. Search engines also prize readability; the results they rank at the top are the ones that they think users will want to do more than just glance at. Regularly updating your law firm’s website with readable legal blog content that appeals to humans and search engine bots alike is a great way to stay at the top of the organic search results and to attract visitors to your site.

Time on Page Is an Indicator of Readability but Not a Characteristic of It

Time on page is one of many factors that search engines use in determining rankings of search results. In other words, it matters not only how many people click on your site but how long they stick around to keep reading. Audio and video content and infographics can encourage people to linger; this will increase visitors’ time on page, simply because they are doing something that is more time consuming than reading. It is much less expensive to produce text content, though, and the more readable your content, the better.

According to Screpy, these are some factors that Google considers when assessing the readability of a web page:

· The most readable texts have sentences of varying length, but the sentences are not excessively long.

· A readable text does not use a given word much more frequently than the subject matter calls for. Keyword stuffing is useless from an SEO perspective, but using a non-keyword such as “plethora” five times in a 1,000-word blog posts is beyond useless, unless, of course Plethora is the name of a company or product you are writing about.

· Paragraphs should not be excessively long, but they should contain more than one sentence. 5-6 lines is the ideal length for a paragraph.

· You should include a subheading before every few paragraphs.

· The ideal font size is 11 or 12 points in a standard font such as Times New Roman. Readers can zoom in or out on their devices if they want the text to appear bigger or smaller.

Human readers can agree that these things all contribute to the readability of a text. To put it another way, weird fonts, long blocks of text, and overuse of words that are not the main focus of the text (you can’t write an entire blog post about prenuptial agreements without using the word “divorce” more than once) make for an annoying reading experience and decrease the likelihood that you can read to the end of the text. Once again, Google knows you better than you know yourself.

Law Blog Writers Knows You Pretty Well, Too

The most efficient way to get readable blog content for your law firm’s site is to hire a content marketing firm that only writes for law firms. The legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will deliver content which will impress readers and search engines with its readability.

The Four Archetypes of Storytelling: Which One Is Most Conducive to Law Firm Blog Posts?

They say that law school changes everything you ever knew about reading and writing. Think back to high school, before you had to read a 20-page court decision in 60 seconds and figure out what the important issues in it were. Remember high school creative writing class and the cardinal rule of storytelling, namely Show, Don’t Tell. (Some high school debate events have you do this, too.) Robert Rose of Content Marketing Institute has identified four story structures for marketing content, which communicate the brand’s values in ways that writing about the brand never could. He has named each of these story structures after the role that the storyteller assumes I telling the story. Some of them are more applicable to legal blog content than others.

Performer, Promoter, Professor, Poet

According to Rose, the four story structures are those of the performer, the promoter, the professor, and the poet. Here is how each of them might manifest themselves in a law firm blog post:

· Performer – You are trying to make the reader feel something. This is an excellent choice for law firm blogs. Depending on your practice area, tell them about the lurid details of a probate dispute or high net worth divorce or about the physical and financial hardships of living with an injury caused by a preventable accident.

· Promoter- Try to make them do something. Depending on your practice area, show them that they need your services when filing for bankruptcy, writing a will, or modifying a parenting plan.

· Professor – Make a persuasive argument based on your knowledge of facts; this is easy for lawyers. Depending on your practice area, convince them that this year’s executive order about non-compete contracts can benefit small businesses or that a prenuptial agreement is the best gift you can give to the family member who will be the personal representative of your estate.

· Poet- Try to change the audience’s perspective on something. A poet story is the most complex story structure. In a law firm blog post, you can take on the role of the poet to show the audience how a particular law or court decision, or even your practice area as a whole, affects their lives. For example, you can illustrate how (as every divorce lawyer but knows but few couples do), the state is a party in every divorce case. You can also show how “declaring bankruptcy” really just means making a budget where most of your income goes to debt repayment while the court makes some of your debts disappear.

It is possible to make any of these story structures fit into a 500-word blog post; conciseness is a virtue in storytelling, no matter which story structure you adopt.

None of the Above?

Perhaps you should stick to being a lawyer and leave the four Ps of professional storytelling to, well, professional storytellers. The legal content writers at Law Blog Writers are poets, professors, promoters, and performers, depending on what your law firm’s blog needs.