While many firms are content-generating powerhouses, disseminating patron alerts, idea management portions, social media posts, and other information each day via the numerous distribution channels with which they interact their goal audiences, they regularly fail to honestly think about the how, what, when, where and why of the content they are creating and how it will genuinely advantage their customers and different influential readers.
These companies are on content material autopilot, merely going thru the motions to churn out notion management pieces as efficaciously as possible, often due to the fact that’s just the way their company does matters, or due to the fact they don’t want to impeach a partner or someone extra senior to them, or due to the fact there is stress to get things out the door to be aggressive with another firm.
If you locate yourself in this function, take a moment to present yourself a “content material time-out” for you to surely consider why you’re doing what you’re doing if it doesn’t make sense along with your logo and commercial enterprise development dreams, without delay trade direction.
Taking the time to make sure that your content advertising and marketing and your business improvement strategies are completely aligned will permit you to create greater targeted, purchaser-centric content material that will better have interaction with your goal audiences and result in new business and the retention of customers.
Remember that the intention of content marketing is not pretty much populating your social media feeds with a consistent movement of content material. Instead, the purpose is to use content material as a differentiator to help role your legal professionals and your company as concept leaders, with a mission to assist in preserving you top of mind with critical individuals for when they have a matter that fits your background. It’s continuously approximately excellent versus amount.
Here are some thoughts to take your content material approach to the next level.
1. Align your content material approach on your business improvement goals
I agree with that every criminal advertising expert ought to think of themselves as a commercial enterprise improvement man or woman irrespective of their job identify. An advertising professional need to be centered on lead generation and business development of their position to without a doubt recognize what their company’s dreams are, especially about content material.
By aligning your content and social media strategy on your BD goals you’ll be capable of awareness in on the proper practices and industries, and the lawyers to highlight inside them. Then use your facts and competitive intelligence to assist support those efforts (which include Google analytics, internet site, social media, and electronic mail statistics, among others). Remember, the whole lot you do need to be targeted on bringing leads and delighting your customers, which includes each piece of content material you create.
2. Show vs. Tell
Your content material ought to be fee-added, helpful and patron-centric. So, don’t just inform your clients why you’re the great legal professionals, show them. Think about the way to reveal which you are a pacesetter in your subject versus telling someone.
Write every piece of content material with this idea in mind – from the best-level concept leadership article to every social media put up. Think about why your customers must care about this while crafting language. Remember that most customarily, your customers aren’t lawyers, so throw the legalese and jargon out the window and write of their language and in a tone that directly speaks to them, no longer your colleagues down the corridor.
3. Reuse and repurpose the whole thing
Lawyer headshots exercise vicinity and occasion pics, formerly posted purchaser signals and articles – all of your images and content material may be reused more than one times to assist enhance your brand and support your lead generation efforts. For example, pull out a thrilling statistic, create a phrase cloud, use icons, a quote or big numbers to carry important factors to existence in a customer alert, and voilà, it’s a unique piece of content. Use an article calendar to help your song and manage posts.
4. Create as soon as, publish everywhere (however modify the message for the medium)
Leverage the social system’s maximum regularly utilized by your clients and prospects, but don’t post the same precise content material and photo to LinkedIn which you could publish to Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. It’s very crucial which you reveal for your goal audiences which you have mastery of the social structures which you are utilizing. Incorrectly the use of a platform shows your target audience which you lack vital social media abilities. So, after every post (duration, tone and content material smart) to standard every the precise social channel.
5. Use your analytics to create more intelligent content material
Marketers have a treasure trove of treasured statistics right at their fingertips thru their records and analytics which can help them generate greater of the content that has carried out well with target audiences and much less of what hasn’t. For extra clues on what resonated maximum (and least) together with your audiences, review your net website online, electronic mail advertising and social media analytics for the highest and least appearing content. Look for commonalities and themes in the general frame reproduction, posts, and headlines, on the way to assist you in creating smarter future content.
6. Your attorneys maintain the content key
It’s now not sufficient to post in your company’s social media debts; you also want to tap into the essential social networks of your attorneys to make specific maximum reach and engagement. Properly educate your lawyers on the way to efficiently use LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to proportion and like content material out of your company organization web page and greater importance, from their own private LinkedIn bills so that you can tap into achieving the people in their active networks.
Note – I find that at the same time as brown bag training where you are showing them slides are beneficial, the maximum effective training for attorneys is seeing by doing. So visit their places of work and show them a way to like, remark and percentage posts and help them get the lay of the land at the LinkedIn home web page and their profile itself. A little hand conserving/deskside education is going an extended manner here.
Hashtags are crucial to comprise on social media channels, especially on Twitter and Instagram. The jury remains out on whether they’re profitable on LinkedIn – although they’re gaining in traction. The motive is that human beings don’t use them a whole lot so that they may be not very useful yet. If you don’t know approximately hashtagify.Me that is a web hashtag seek/discovery engine that offers you with the top trending hashtags related to a specific subject matter and a few basic analytics too, you want to start the usage of it right away. LinkedIn has a useful hashtag notion device right in the body of your posts based on the content material you input, which is usually spot on.
One notice on hashtags – try to comprise them in the frame of the post in preference to waiting till the stop to include more than one hashtags in a row, use no greater than 2-three in a position (or they get stressful) and don’t make up your own hashtag or use anything that is too standard, along with the word “regulation” for example. Why? It won’t help your content material be discovered, and you are taking away from your content and using up precious phrase count number.
8. Use evergreen content material for your advantage
Evergreen content is SEO-optimized content that doesn’t have an expiration date or loses its relevancy and value through the years. It is brilliant, useful material that provides fee whether it is examined nowadays, next week or a yr from now. So why is it referred to as “evergreen?” The evergreen tree is an image of eternal lifestyles because this kind of tree continues its leaves all through the seasons, as opposed to shedding them. Like the timber, the evergreen content material is taken into consideration sustainable and lasting.
Creating an evergreen content strategy is less complicated than you believe you studied due to the fact you have already got all of the content and most of the tools which you want. It merely requires a touch innovative wondering on the way to correctly repurpose them. For instance, content material opportunities (and the visible assets that go along with them) along with legal professional bios, vacations, workplace openings, firm history, undying purchaser indicators (along with why you want to have a will), case studies on matters, in addition to content material associated with careers, professional improvement, pro bono, variety and events, as well as facts pulled from transcripts can all be used to fill in content gaps for your editorial calendar. For more significant in this subject matter, check my JD Supra article, What to Do When You Run Out of Things to Say – Your How-To Guide to Creating an Evergreen Content Strategy.
9. Incorporate visuals
I’m a company believer that you have to put up not anything to social media without an image. Why? Because social media posts with photographs gain more views and engagement, duration. Today, each person can include visuals into their social media approach; you need to be innovative and ingenious. You can without difficulty reuse and repurpose images that you already have and resize them the usage of tools right to your cellphone.
Also, there are numerous photo and online design tools that permit you to create visually arresting photographs and photographs free of charge or at a low fee along with Canva and Picstitch to help you convey your social media posts to lifestyles. For more low cost/free gear you can incorporate into your social media content method, take a look at my JD Supra article exploring 17 cool match tools that you need to recognize about.
10. Focus at the headlines
To face out from the many emails that in-house suggest receiving each day and the countless social media posts clogging their feeds, you ought to create headlines and copy so that it will draw them in. The situation strains/headlines of your emails (so patron alerts, press releases, white papers, CLE applications and whatever else that you send through email to clients/contacts) is the first actual thing that they see and determines whether a person wants to open your email – or now not. Make them clean, actionable, brief and concise and extra factors if you could create a “how-to” or “why” piece or use numbers or lists. “Listicles” are well-known methods of breaking down complex information into digestible chunks.
LinkedIn is the most important social media channel for regulation firm enterprise development and expert networking. It allows you to quickly construct and develop relationships so that you can carry in new commercial enterprise and referrals, strengthen your emblem and live top of mind with key people on your network. So, use it neatly and use it regularly (meaning post and percentage price-added content, and interact meaningfully along with your connections). I write loads approximately how to maximize LinkedIn and use it correctly – see my JD Supra articles on LinkedIn profile fundamentals and more superior LinkedIn to-do’s – due to the fact I have never seen the platform at once cause new commercial enterprise extra than I even have in the closing year.
12. Think nice no longer amount
I touched in this a chunk above, but since it’s such an essential factor, I desired to commit a bullet to it. Always take into account that it’s not how frequently you submit content to social media that makes a real effect, however instead what you say and how you say it. The best now not the number of your posts ought to usually be your primary consciousness and retaining that idea at the leading edge of your content material strategy will help manual your ordinary efforts.
13. The sound is on occasion top enough
So many attorneys I know are perfectionists, and as a result, they invent an alert on a well-timed topic; however then sit down on it as they edit it or wordsmith it again and again. Here’s the factor although, if you don’t distribute it, your competition will. It’s often more crucial to permit your clients to understand about an essential replace in the regulation before it’s too overdue. So, don’t wait – create and distribute content material at the same time as the subject is hot. You don’t continually want to be a content overachiever – now and again true is right enough.
14. Engage audiences with new types of content material
While written content including a patron alert or concept leadership piece which you then can promote via social media will usually be the foundation of law firm content advertising, why now not dip your toes into some of the more recent approaches of attractive together with your target audiences through your content material? For instance, function your attorneys discussing recent matter successes or a case observe thru a video series, create a podcast series with an industry consciousness or use Facebook Live to create a short webinar collection.
Provide your audiences with new methods to digest your content. Also, take into account that you may reuse and repurpose your existing content material for distinctive mediums. So, use a consumer alert as the idea for a podcast, video or webinar. Every single piece of written content material you produce may be delivered to lifestyles in a brand new way. It merely calls for a little creativity.
15. Stop doing “random acts of content material.”
So many companies and lawyers spend the time to create desirable content, but then they post it just once on social media. This is a big waste of time for absolutely everyone involved. Here’s why: Your clients and prospects are surprisingly busy those who are possible to miss the content you post and distribute to your social channels. E mail remains an excellent manner to reach your targets.
So, whilst the usage of social, leverage and maximize content by using sharing posts numerous instances using the equal trackable link but changing up the content within the posts by using using a number of the thoughts above (pulling out a statistic, a quote, the use of icons or images – you get the concept). Utilize your content material calendar to help with scheduling to make sure that you have space between every put up. Also, I promise you that nobody is following your company or your lawyers intently sufficient to understand that your company posted something later on this topic.
Remember that at the same time as it’s first-rate if your firm has heaps of followers on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, actual social media success is measured these days by using a great deal higher than likes, shares or follows.
Attracting and engaging audiences thru your content material is what is going to result in new commercial enterprise and the retention of customers. Remember, the closing aim of content advertising is to pressure your readers to do so, preferably within the form of preserving your firm. For your content advertising approach to be in reality a hit, you need to continually reflect consideration on how it can build relationships to your attorneys, showcase their information, spotlight key practices and industries at your firm, all even as it provides value to your goal audiences. Good content permits you to do all of those; firms need to make their content (and visuals) paintings smarter and harder for them.
The accurate news is that maximum corporations aren’t but aligning their content approach to their enterprise improvement desires, so there may be a real possibility for those firms which can be geared up, inclined and capable of doing this. So, strive to incorporate a number of these pointers into your content method and allow me to understand how it is going!