Content Marketing for Law Firms

Content marketing has been around ever since the Internet first formed, only we didn't call it "content marketing" back then. Or even "digital marketing." Back then it was just "marketing on the Internet." It wasn't very sophisticated, and most people didn't know how to do it.

But back then, smart marketers knew how to market their products without a lot of hype and flash. They could be subtle and persuade their customers through education, not by blasting people with annoying ads and flashy banners. You didn't have to SELL! SELL! SELL!

Back then, you just had to tell, tell, tell.

That's what content marketing is now. It was born out of the idea of persuasion through education. By educating people about how your product or service solves their problems, they'll hopefully decide that your product or service is the best one to buy.

As lawyers, you can use content marketing to show potential clients that you're an expert in your field and that you know what you're talking about. You can show people that you're the best solution to their problems, all without ever saying, "Hire me! Hire me! Hire me!"

Content marketing is basically marketing via content, whether it's words, images, or sounds. Those are the three building blocks of all content marketing. That means content can be:

• Blog articles
• White papers
• Ebooks
• Real books
• Videos
• Photos
• Infographics
• Podcasts
• Music

Basically, if you can read it, watch it, or hear it, it's content.

So content marketing for law firms means writing blog articles about the different industries you work in and the issues they're facing. It means creating explainer videos about a point of law for YouTube and TikTok. It means interviewing experts for your podcast.

As long as you can educate, you can persuade, without resorting to typical advertising tactics.

Think of regular marketing as Push Marketing. Marketers push their marketing message out to people. TV commercials, radio commercials, ads on websites, direct mail, social media ads, and so on. It's called push marketing because of the way it reaches people.

It's sometimes also called interruption marketing because it interrupts what we're doing. It interrupts our favorite TV show or radio station. It interrupts the web page we're reading. It interrupts our Instagram and Twitter scrolling. People try to escape it and install ad blockers on their web browsers, or flip stations when the commercials come on.

But content marketing is Pull Marketing. We pull people into our website. We create content that people search for. So, we focus on placing high in the search engine results. We share compelling ideas and information that make people say, "I want more of that" or "How can I fix this?"

With regular marketing, you push out as much stuff as you can and hope it finds people at just the right moment.

With content marketing, you create content and wait for people to show up for it.

(Actually, you do more than that, but for right now, that's enough.)

This is important for law firms that want to do content marketing, so pay close attention.

Content marketing is not advertising.

The laws are different for every country, but here in the United States, there are specific laws about how law firms are allowed to advertise and market their firms.*

• I once wrote about an attorney who created a billboard that showed him being much taller than the people standing around him. The caption said, "John Smith is a giant in his field." His state bar association said he wasn't allowed to do that because he wasn't actually a real giant. No, I'm not joking.*

In the U.S., lawyers are also not allowed to give legal advice.

For example, they cannot specifically answer a person's question on a blog or website. So if someone asked, "How do I file a lawsuit against a competitor?" the lawyer could not give them the specific steps of what that person needs to do to file a lawsuit.

But they can educate people through content. They'll say things like, "Well, I can't advise you on your specific case, but I can give you the basic steps about how a lawsuit gets filed in your state/country."

An attorney who wants to do content marketing could write a blog article or shoot a video called, "How to File a Lawsuit in Israel" (or wherever they live). It's not directed to a specific person, it doesn't give legal advice, and it never directs the reader to hire them. They can discuss how a lawsuit gets filed, but they can't tell an individual what to do.

If you're not sure whether you can do content marketing for your law firm, check with your bar association or governing association.

There are several reasons why law firms need content marketing, regardless of the size of your firm or the kind of law you practice.

As you go through these, you'll see that nearly everything refers to blog articles. That's because I ghostwrite blog articles for other companies, but the same principles apply to videos and podcasts. Even if you prefer doing videos and podcasts, you still need a blog for your content marketing.

1. Content marketing improves your SEO.

Many people take to Google to answer a question or solve a problem. They search for things like "How do I write a blog article for hospitals?" "Do manufacturers need to use blockchain?" or "Local intellectual property attorneys for life science startups."

You can improve your search ranking by writing blog articles specifically about those topics more than once. As you do this more and more, Google will come to see your website as a trusted resource with all kinds of answers to people's questions.

If it were my blog, I might write things like"How do intellectual property attorneys help life science startups," "How soon should a life science startup hire an IP attorney?" and "Five reasons life science startups need intellectual property attorneys." And then I would expand on each of those five reasons in separate articles.

By writing about this topic over and over, whenever a life science startup searches for "IP attorneys for life science startups," my website would rank at or near the top.

Best of all, you can even switch out "life science startups" for other industries you might serve: publishing companies, media outlets, aerospace manufacturers, financial technology, and so on. You don't even need a separate blog. Just repeat the same type of article, but with different specialties and industries.

2. It increases website traffic.

The higher you rank on Google, the more traffic you'll get on your website. More traffic means more potential clients. It means you're answering more questions and providing more information, and more people are interested in what you do.

You can track all of this via Google Analytics. Ask your webmaster to install the Google Analytics tracking code and then monitor your web traffic. See which articles and topics get the most and least visitors least. Then start doing experiments with the content.

• Write more articles about the least-visited topics. Can you increase the traffic?
• Write more articles about the most-visited topics. Did that increase?
• Experiment with the length of articles: do you get more or less traffic for longer or shorter articles? (Don't make anything less than 500 words though.)
• Record videos of you discussing the articles and post them on YouTube. Then, embed that video into the blog article. Did your search rank and the traffic go up?

3. It generates leads

I lived in Indianapolis when I first started blog ghostwriting, around 2009. I had a friend who was also a ghost blogger. She had a client who was a personal injury attorney and he served all of Central Indiana. He advertised in every single Yellow Pages book in the area and was spending about $8,000 USD per month just on the Yellow Pages.

When she started blogging for him, she had him get a different phone number that was only listed on his blog. She had his staff count all the phone calls that came into the blog phone number and to the Yellow Pages numbers.

He soon discovered he was receiving ten times the phone calls from his blog than he was getting from the Yellow Pages. So when the contracts were up, he canceled each and every Yellow Pages ad the following year. That's because he was able to increase his leads for a lot less money than he was spending on the Yellow Pages.

Why?

Because 14 years ago, people who needed lawyers were not using the phone book, they were using Google. Even today, almost no one uses a phone book. Which also means you need to focus on your Google Business listing (the 21st century's Yellow Pages), but that's a topic for another article.

4. Content marketing increases your website's authority and reach

A static website that just lists your practice area, attorneys, and history is called brochureware. It's nothing more than an electronic brochure that doesn't need to be printed.

But a blog updates your website on a regular basis. The more you publish, the more your site changes. That's important because Google looks for websites that update frequently. You can do that by either changing the text on the brochureware website, or you can add blog articles once or twice a week. Changing the text is easier for you, but blogging is better for your search ranking.

Plus, if you write really interesting content, people will be more likely to link back to your articles. Those are called backlinks. Those backlinks serve almost like votes that say "This content is interesting. Other people should read it."

The more backlinks to your site, the higher it's likely to rank. Don't cheat and get backlinks from questionable sources. Google knows the difference and it only wants only backlinks from sites that are reputable and related to your work. So, no backlinks to your firm from an Internet gaming site.

5. It improves your own writing

I've known many lawyers, and I have written for several of them. And I can tell you that there's a difference between lawyer writing and what I call "regular person writing."

Lawyer writing is complex, uses a lot of big words, and is easily understood by most lawyers.

Regular person writing is simple. It uses short words and short sentences. It's easily understood by everyone else.

Regular people don't understand lawyer writing. But lawyers understand regular people writing.

You could be the best at lawyer writing, creating briefs that will make even the most hardened judge weep with joy at your pointed logic and sound arguments.

But regular people will be unmoved and unimpressed. They won't care. It won't make them think you're brilliant or that you really know your stuff.

So they'll go with your competition who did explain things well and made them easy to understand. Write blog articles that sound like regular people writing and your own writing will improve.

(And this has been an example of regular people writing.)

6. It's cost-effective

Compare the cost of blogging and content marketing to any other kind of advertising. TV and radio advertising can cost hundreds and thousands of dollars per month. Print newspapers are slowly but surely dying. Internet advertising is obnoxious and people often use ad blockers in their web browsers to avoid it.

But content marketing is much more cost-effective. You write the article, publish it on your website, and it continues to improve your search rank and pull people into your website.

Content marketing is one of those things that you can do for free, but it doesn't hurt to hire a professional to do a better job so you can focus on generating revenues for your firm.

7. Your competition is doing it.

There's a very good chance that your competitors are already using content marketing. It's especially useful for very small firms and individual attorneys who want to compete with the larger firms, but don't have the big budgets to do TV, radio, and billboards.

Content marketing can actually put small firms on an equal footing with larger firms. For every blog article a big firm writes, a small firm can one. Or you can even write two and get ahead. And with the right blog writing and linking strategy, you can outperform the large firms.

In some countries, however, they're not doing content marketing. No one has embraced blogging and so content marketing is an untapped resource. There are still some industries here in the U.S. in 2023 where if just one manufacturer embraced content marketing, they could dominate the entire industry. This is true for law firms in some countries as well.

Content marketing is one of the most cost-effective methods for promoting your law firm's website. You can create all the content, share all your expertise, and you don't have to spend a lot of money to reach your prospects.

You can target your specific niche, create content only for them, and you're not needlessly spending a lot of money to reach people who aren't the least bit interested in what you do. (TV and radio advertising has that problem.)

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