Ask a room full of legal marketers how their firms got started in content marketing, and the answer will likely be, “Well, we just kind of did it.” Many of us probably dove headlong into the practice without a complete understanding of what content marketing can do and how to get the most out of it. With the birth of the Internet, content marketing has become a discipline unto itself, founded on bedrock principles, adhering to an established set of best practices, and designed to produce measurable results.
Luckily for us, Arnie Kuenn and Brad Kuenn of the digital marketing agency, Vertical Measures, have put all the pieces together in their book Content Marketing Works: 8 Steps to Transform Your Business, a comprehensive and detailed guide to everything from ideation and strategy to execution and performance assessment.
As with any marketing resource, the first question readers in our industry will ask is, “How relevant will this information be to legal marketing?” The answer is very. The authors do not address, of course, the need to devise multiple content marketing strategies for multiple practice groups within a law firm, or that we generally must rely on our lawyers to produce most of our content. Nevertheless, the book is an outstanding guide for those just getting started in content marketing, and for those looking to refine their content marketing practices -- regardless of industry. Kuenn and Kuenn present a step-by-step process and load each step with specific, actionable advice.
The book contains so many useful tips that it’s difficult to narrow it down to a short list. But we’ll try. Here are eight pieces of advice deserving of honorable mention:
- Great content should solve your audience’s problem. Your content should provide useful information to clients and prospective clients. It’s not enough to issue a bulletin announcing a new regulation, for example. Go one step further and explain how that regulation may affect clients’ business operations. By consistently providing information that’s engaging and useful, you build trust with your audience.
- Data is your best friend. Your organization creates content for all sorts of reasons. It could be to enhance brand awareness, increase engagement on your LinkedIn group, or get clients to attend your webinar. All of these interactions are measurable, and the numbers you compile help you in two very important ways. First, by setting goals for your content and monitoring its performance, you’ll understand what works and what doesn’t, which allows you to adjust and improve your strategy. Second, by delivering positive, measurable results to attorneys, you encourage them to produce more content and better focus their efforts.
- “Going viral” is probably not going to happen... and that’s okay. Everyone would love for their content to get shared all across the web, racking up millions of hits. However, this is neither a realistic nor desirable goal for most of us, especially legal marketers. It’s far more effective to publish quality pieces for our target audiences on a consistent basis than it is to rely on a superstar piece of content that will be in the spotlight for a short time and reach the wrong audiences.
- An editorial calendar is more than just a list of what gets published and when. In addition to plotting out publication dates and deadlines, include where you will distribute the content, how you will promote it, and what goals you expect the content to achieve. This will help you work more efficiently and produce better results.
- Look at everything your firm produces as potentially shareable content. For law firms, “content” has traditionally meant client bulletins and newsletters. Expand your scope to include webinars, podcasts, videos, infographics, white papers, slide presentations, social media posts, and even press releases. And repurpose existing pieces as new products. Maybe that lengthy written analysis can form the basis for a client webinar. Perhaps that press release you issued on a new hire is great fodder for a post on LinkedIn. Each time you repurpose a piece of content, you have a fresh opportunity to get your firm name in front of your target audience.
- You don’t have to be a video pro to do video well. Many lawyers and law firms are doing video these days, and the production values range from pricey, professionally directed pieces to short clips shot on mobile devices. You certainly want any video you produce to look as good as possible, but the key to creating great videos is the same as with any other format: offer compelling, useful information in an engaging Video personalizes the presenter in a way that other formats cannot, and for this reason, online audiences are more forgiving of a low-budget look if the trade-off is a stronger connection with the content.
- Social Media Optimization (SMO) belongs on your content marketing checklist. Social media channels not only provide additional visibility for your brand, but also generate traffic to your websites and blogs. As such, your social media accounts and posts should be optimized to perform well on both these counts. Customize banners to adhere to your firm’s branding guidelines. Be sure your keywords are in your profiles so that your profile ranks higher in search. Include your keywords in posts, image tags, and hashtags too. Above all, always link back to your website.
- You can learn a lot from the competition. Follow your competitors on social media, read their blogs, and subscribe to their publications. This will tell you how often they publish, what they write about, how well they engage with audiences, and how they rank in search. Use this intelligence to create content that your competitors either aren’t delivering or aren’t promoting well.
That’s just a small sampling of advice from Kuenn and Kuenn; I highly recommend reading the whole book. Content Marketing Works: 8 Steps to Transform Your Business is a comprehensive look at the entire content marketing process, and as such, it stands as a great primer and reference guide with plenty of material relevant to legal marketing.
By Gina Eliadis, Senior Marketing Manager, Ober|Kaler, for the September/October 2016 issue of Capital Ideas.