Content Marketing is very much a buzz phrase at the moment and is in fact an essential aspect of legal marketing. It’s all about creating and sharing interesting content. Your goal is not to sell your product directly but to provide valuable information to your target audience.

By delivering reliable, relevant and interesting content, you will find that you attract more online traffic and that your business will grow over time. Content marketing is not an instant fix, but part of a long-term legal marketing strategy that will lead to more cases coming your way. It is therefore well worth investing in.

As with all things online, it is an art as well as a science so here are a few basic tips to get you started with content marketing:

What content?

Blogs

Blogging gets a bad press. On hearing the word, you may well be imagining legions of nerds revealing their innermost thoughts in the dank corners of the world wide web but this is not the case. Blogs are so much more and are the beating heart of content marketing. Blogs are the best way of updating your site with quality content. By posting regularly you will drive traffic to your site which in turn leads to more enquiries and more business. Blogs can be targeted to your desired audience and make full use of your legal expertise. And blogs don’t just have to be articles. In fact, the best blogs will feature the following:

• Infographics – These are eye-catching representations of information that make facts and figures easier to process. Users are able to absorb information quickly and easily. As a visually attractive package these are also highly shareable, especially through Pinterest.
• Images – photographs and graphic representations of data are great ways of breaking up text and making your content more enjoyable and informative
• Videos – not everything on YouTube is animal-related or a bizarre dance craze. Videos are a great way of getting information across or illustrating a point.

Know Your Audience

Before creating any content, you must ‘become’ your audience or at the very least put yourself firmly in their shoes – what do they like? what do they find interesting? how do they like to interact with information?

Once you know your audience, you can start creating the kind of content that they will love.

Making It Relevant

By now you know the types of content that you can produce and who you are targeting, it’s time to get creating. Spend some time producing your content. If you don’t have the time, then get someone else to make the effort because the rewards are great.

If you can bash out ‘content’ in an hour then there is every chance that it is not going to be the kind of material that people will spend time reading and then sharing. It becomes pointless. The end goal of legal marketing and in turn content marketing on your site is to build more traffic and to convert that traffic into business. This will only happen with quality content and the old adage remains true, if something is worth doing, it is worth doing well. Here are a few pointers:

• Ensure that your content is unique, informative and relevant
• Make the most of your knowledge and expertise
• Post regularly – it is essential to update your site regularly
• Find topics that are relevant by searching Google News for current stories or examining trending topics on Twitter
• SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) – if you don’t know what SEO is, then find someone that does. It underpins all of content marketing.
• Create interesting relevant headlines for skim-readers and to make people read on
• In the legal sector ‘How to guides’ are really useful and popular
• Copywriting is key to legal marketing but nowadays any copy in your content has to be focussed on the user experience.
• If your content looks like an advertisement, then it will most likely be ignored. Make sure you focus on having great readable content.

Social Media

So you’ve followed the tips and produced some fantastic content. Now time to share it and watch it get shared. The better the content the more it will be shared naturally. It will make its way across the web with people sharing because you have provided useful, attractively presented, well-written content. This helps build your brand as a respected voice.

There seems to be a new addition to the social media world every day but that doesn’t mean that social networking and bookmarking is any less important. Ultimately you want your content to be seen by as many people as possible. Make full use of the following to help spread the word:

• Facebook
• Google+
• Twitter
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• StumbleUpon

It’s easy to add a whole host of easy-to-use sharing buttons to your blog posts to make it easy for people to share what they have enjoyed.

These steps may be simple but they do take time. They also represent the tip of the iceberg when it comes to legal marketing. With your time both precious and expensive, why not get in contact with us at Samson to find out exactly how we can help with legal marketing.

Author: Guest Blogger