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.