Blogging is not as easy as it seems. It is necessary to spend time and resources on creating legal content, forming a promotion strategy, etc. But remember that when working on creating and promoting a blog.
Over the past 15 years we have witnessed a real revolution in the blogosphere. Today, a successfully written text by your lawyer or partner can be immediately read by tens of thousands of people, and in the morning they will be celebrities.
Many of the lawyers of our time have become known through their blogs. They have become experts in their practice, opinion leaders. But as the importance of this tool grows, so does the importance of quality materials – which is especially important for the legal business, which has decided to take up content marketing.
Blogging is not as easy as it seems. You need to spend time and resources to create legal content, create a promotion strategy, etc. But remember that when you work on creating and promoting a blog, you invest in your reputation as an expert, which will pay off the investment in the long term.
For example, in our law firm there are frequent situations when a company appeals to a specific specialist, who wrote an article on “How to appeal against illegal actions of the tax authorities?
This is the situation when brands are people and people are brands. The client applies to a law firm, but at the same time wants to talk to a specific lawyer, because he found the answers to his questions in advance and decided on the choice of a specialist.
So, you decided to start a legal blog. Where to start? From this article you will learn the 9 stages of creating a successful content marketing strategy.
Target
Why do we need your blog? Give an informative and concise answer to that question. Before you start a resource strategy, define its main goal. Take a minute and give honest answers to the following questions:
- What is the global goal of your law firm?
- What are the key practices that make you 80% profitable?
- Which practices should be developed in the first place?
- Which lawyers on your team can write articles?
- How many articles per week do you plan to post?
By answering these questions, you will create a strong skeleton for all subsequent strategic decisions.
Buyer’s portrait
Ideally, you should tailor content to your audience’s preferences, focusing on the portrait of the perfect client – this will make a blog a great tool for lidogeneration. But who is it, your ideal client?
By answering this question in detail, you will be able to create materials for the different stages of the sales funnel, focused on the interests of your clients.
After creating a portrait of an ideal client, you need to investigate audience behavior and adapt content to client problems, pain points, interests, etc. This may seem like a fairly expensive process, but there are several free tools and channels for initial analysis:
- Q&A services
- Social networks
- Tools to alert you to new content created in your practice: RSS feeds and Google Alerts.
- Blogs comments.
For example, in matters of registration as a VAT payer of a legal entity in Ukraine, after the entry in 2011 of the Tax Code, we get a number of problematic issues faced by an ordinary entrepreneur:
The terms of voluntary registration under Article 182 of the Tax Code of Ukraine have already been missed, and the client takes part in the tender or his foreign economic contract is on fire. There is no time to wait so long or to create a turnover in the company and to move within the framework of Article 182 of the TCU. 181 of the TCU or buy a ready-made company with VAT.
Absence of economic transactions within 12 months and as a consequence, the cancellation of his registration by a VAT payer.
Availability of a mass registration address and granting it the status of 9 in the tax service, with the need to visit the tax police to remove it and solve the issue of annulment of registration by a VAT payer.
Necessity to make a conditional sale after the VAT has been taken away, etc.
The main purpose of incoming marketing is to strengthen the trust of the target group to your brand. If you find a list of topics that interest customers and then disclose these issues on your legal blog, people’s trust is likely to grow.
Conquer the respect and trust of the audience over and over again, and then grateful readers will bring their friends and acquaintances to you.
Competition
Do your competitors have blogs? Make a list of 5-10 law firms that use this tool so you can quickly audit subject content.
Tell me, would you like your clients to look for information about legal services from competitors? The answer is obvious. But if your site does not provide all the necessary information, clients have nothing else left but to go to other resources.
Try to audit the content of your main competitors’ resources. If the most important keywords for business their rating in the search engine exceeds your performance, then write and distribute better content based on the same keywords.
If you see gaps in your content strategy as a result of the audit, then fill them out. This is what we teach our students at the School of Legal Marketing and our LEGAL PRO Legal Business Development and Scaling up Program.
Keywords
Keywords give the meaning and themes of your material to search engines. Agree when a potential client is looking for a specific phrase, such as “liquidation of the enterprise” would be good if the search engine will give him a link to your article, not the content of a competitor.
But what is your audience looking for? You will have to spend some time on the study of keywords typed by potential clients in search engines. Once you’ve decided on this, integrate the keywords into your posts.
Remember – search engine algorithms are constantly changing. It is not necessary to be carried away by doubtful methods, and to try to promote a material only at the expense of keys or purchase links. The quality of content in any case remains in the first place.
Content Distribution
Creating quality content is a great start, but it gets a little harder when it comes to distributing posts and increasing influence in your niche.
However, stable creation of high quality legal content can take the lion’s share of time. There is good advice in this regard – the content can be republished or rethought.
Study your articles from the past years – you will surely find many interesting ideas and important topics that you can submit differently, in light of the changed situation in your country’s legislation, new challenges or opportunities, etc. In this way you will reach a wider target audience and convey your ideas to people who have read you recently.
Promotion
When it comes to blog strategy, promotion and “promotion” means placing content where it is more likely to be seen, read and appreciated by the target audience.
Using inbound marketing approaches to distribute your content requires a lot of effort and dedication. When it comes to the specifics of blog maintenance and promotion, the most important component is so-called Influencer marketing.
You must find resources that will host your legal articles, Internet resources where your potential clients are located. This should be a targeted work, you need to make a list of periodicals where it makes sense to send your legal texts.
But in our practice there were cases when the Internet resources themselves, without prior agreement, just took from our law firm blog and posted it. In this case, you should take care of one thing – to preserve the authorship and hyperlinks of keywords leading to the page of your site with a particular practice or service.
In addition, you should establish contact with opinion leaders. To begin with, it is worth identifying the most authoritative people in the industry – those characters that are more likely to be trusted by the audience. Make a list of such opinion leaders, read and comment on their blogs, subscribe to their email newsletter, thank them for their particularly successful emails, etc.
It is important to stay in constant contact with influential people. Plan the time and number of social interactions with opinion leaders for the near future: an intervention can be a thank you response to an email newsletter, a blog comment, a repost, a comment on a social network, etc.
Long and purposeful work in this direction will expand the network of contacts, the audience and your influence in the professional sphere. Influencer marketing is only one aspect of promotion, but many marketers believe it is the most important.
