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.