At the heart of successful legal content marketing lies a steady stream of quality content. But creating relevant, engaging content on a regular basis requires a substantial amount of time and resources. To make the best of your limited time and resources, it is crucial to begin your journey with a simple legal marketing content plan.
What is a legal marketing content plan?
A legal marketing content plan is a document that outlines the website and law firm blog content you plan to publish, ideally covering a period of one to three years. But if that’s too daunting, perhaps start with the next month or three and build up a long-term plan once you’ve got the hang of it.
Broadly, your legal marketing plan will include your goals, deliverables, timelines, and who’s accountable. A good content plan helps you align your law firm marketing goals with the needs of your target clients and search engines like Google.
With a thorough content plan, you can identify your audience, regularly create content that is tailored to them, optimise the process of content creation, and attract your ideal clients to your law firm.
Each law firm has a unique blend of practice areas, locations, values, lawyers, experience and potential clients. A thoughtful legal marketing plan can help you reflect the strengths of your law firm to build connections with clients and referral sources.
To be effective, here are a few questions a content plan must answer:
Who are you writing for?
Before you begin writing, it helps to identify the clients you want to attract and put together some information about them. In other words: who are you writing for, and what do you know about them? This process is known as building a client persona.
A client persona is a semi-fictional representation of your clients and includes demographics like age, gender and education for individuals, or size, industry and location, for businesses. It can include any details that are relevant to your practice and the clients you are targeting.
Your client persona should also outline what problems your clients are trying to solve – this will help you create targeted, useful content for your audience. It should also include information about how clients access information – are they more likely to look for information on their own, or will someone else be looking on their behalf? What devices are they going to use? A meticulous client persona may seem like a lot of work, but it will help you create content that is useful, accessible, and effective in establishing your expertise with potential clients.
What questions are your clients asking?
Answering your clients’ most pressing questions is key to building trust as well as appearing in search results. While planning your content, consider:
- What concerns do your clients have?
- What are the most common questions clients have asked you in the past?
- Are some concerns time-sensitive?
- While looking for solutions, what words may a client enter into a search engine?
The answers to these questions inform the topics, tone, pitch and schedule of your content.
Sticking to your content plan
Make it specific
You are more likely to stick to a legal marketing content plan that is clear and specific. Along with content topics, your plan must also detail who will write, edit, and publish the content, with dates and deadlines for each task in the publishing process.
Keep it realistic
It can be tempting to get ambitious about content planning, but be realistic about the amount of time and resources your lawyers can spare to write law firm blogs.
If you have bigger projects, like whitepapers or ebooks, break them down into smaller, attainable goals. Lastly, be realistic about what you expect from the content you develop. Traffic and search rankings do not rise overnight, you need to keep up a regular and sustained effort. Over six to twelve months you should start to see a difference.
Review and refine
It pays to periodically review and refine the plan, taking audience feedback and lawyers’ schedules into consideration. If you’re coming up against unyielding time constraints, consider outsourcing your content needs to meet the goals of your content plan.