Developing Your Law Firm’s Content Marketing Strategy, PART 1

By now you’ve heard about the value a blog brings to your personal brand and website. If there is any doubt remaining let me assure you that on the internet, content is king. While I am sure you’re interested and eager to get started (I don’t think you’d be reading this post if you weren’t) the question that comes to mind is “how do I go about it?” The following post aims to answer that question in a series.

A good law firm content strategy starts with a solid understanding of your target audience. At ONE400 we develop a Client Insights Profile that identifies demographic and psychographic information about the audience that our clients are trying to reach. In other advertising and marketing circles this may be called a customer persona. Creating a profile around your target audience helps you identify characteristics and attributes about your targeted audience that allow you to generate content that your readers will find engaging and useful. It will also serve as a guide for where you should attempt to distribute your content in addition to your blog. Finally, a client insights profile will help you to determine topics, keywords and keyphrases that you will use in your content so that you are also receiving the benefits of search engines indexing your content and making it available for people who may be searching for those terms.

It’s not uncommon for many law firms to maintain several practice areas but until you become a seasoned content marketer. I’d recommend starting with only one specific case type that you’d like to see more of and develop a client insights profile around that. To provide an example, I’ll use family law, specifically divorce to demonstrate what I mean:

The profile used in the example here highlights a couple of things about the audience we are going after. As you can see in this example we are targeting middle income women with some college education and that has children and is either recently separated or will soon be. This is a sample taken from an actual law firm we helped and in this particular case we found that the profile described above was going to provide the greatest opportunity for new divorce cases. How you create a profile for your audience at your firm can be determined pretty easily.

Developing a client insights profile of your own doesn’t have to mean hours and hours of research. One easy way to get a snapshot is to go through your files and look at the most profitable cases over the last couple of years. Aggregate that case data and think about the various attributes that each of those cases and clients had in common. As I mentioned early, try and be specific. Your content marketing efforts will be more likely to see success if you are generating high quality and engaging content for a very specific audience. Once you’ve put together a profile of those profitable cases, create persona around the clients who were retained on those cases. Be narrow in your approach. You can always generate other personas content later, but start slowly so that you create a sustainable process.

Next week, I’ll tell you how to use the profile that you’ve created to generate keywords and topics that your audience and search engines will love. This will help you generate leads and rank high on search engines like Google. If you want to receive an email when part 2 of this post launches, submit it below.