How Backward Design Can Help Your Law Firm Reach Its Content Marketing Goals

Lawyers and teachers are among the professions where people are brainstorming and strategizing about their work, even outside of working hours.  The most successful teachers plan their lessons using a method called backward design.  This method requires you to think first about what you want students to know, remember, and apply about your subject matter even after they graduate; these are called enduring understandings.  Ideally, the whole school, across subject areas, agrees on shared goals at the beginning of the backward design process.  Then they think of how they will measure the students’ progress toward the enduring understanding.  Deciding which books to assign and what to do during a given class session is the last step.  

Backward design is more like cooking a meal than setting an itinerary.  You have to know how long to bake a pavlova and when the guests will arrive to eat it before you know when to start mixing the ingredients, and you have to see which ingredients you have before you decide which ones to buy.  Unfortunately, when it comes to content marketing, most law firms do the content creation equivalent of cracking a dozen eggs into a bowl and then Googling “how to pavlova.”  This year, you should take a more rational approach to creating law firm marketing content.

Backward Design Is for Law Firms, Too

Before you think about how you want your marketing content to be, think about what your law firm wants to accomplish.  Does your family law practice want to focus on litigation involving high-net-worth couples or on helping the 99 percent finalize their divorces and resolve post-divorce co-parenting issues as inexpensively as possible?  If the former, you should focus on being seen at events that only the wealthy can afford, such as by networking with divorce concierges or being a corporate sponsor of a social event with expensive tickets.  If the latter, stick to listicles and videos about cost-effective solutions to family law issues. Either way, you need a user-friendly website with informative content.

Don’t Go Chasing Black Cats

As for what kind of content you want on your site’s practice area pages and blog posts, think about what your current and future clients care about.  A blog post about how to communicate with your spouse about money and parenting when both of you have divorced parents will interest some people, but those people are not in need of your services.  If you are a family law firm focused on affordable solutions, it is better to include blog posts about downward modifications of child support and how to make a workable parenting plan when one of your children is of school age and the other is a toddler.  Don’t be like the cat food company that went to a content marketing firm and asked to make their site rank for the keyword “black cat” at Halloween.  The content marketing strategist explained that the “black cat” searches at Halloween are of people looking for Halloween decorations, costume ideas, scary stories, or perhaps a new cat to adopt; none of those people are going to buy cat food in the near future.  SEO is about pursuing your company’s goals, not about getting 15 minutes of fame on Google.

An Ounce of Focus Is Worth a Pound of Showmanship

Law Blog Writers, LLC can deliver custom-written legal marketing content that serves your law firm’s short-term and long-term goals.