A Step-by-step Guide To High-quality Legal Content Creation

Content creation, SEO optimization, and lead conversion have become marketing buzzwords in the last decade. However, are you aware of the value that legal content creation can add to your firm’s marketing strategy?

Here is a 6-step guide on how to get started. Make use of your expertise and knowledge of the legal field to attract new audiences, gain leads and monitor growth.

In the social-savvy, modern-day age  we’re now living in, content creation isn’t a niche technique within the marketing world. It’s a necessity. Hubspot has found that blogging is the third most common marketing strategy for businesses. Blog content  can boost brand awareness, reach new audiences and generate leads.

However, many legal firms still don’t invest their time and money into blog creation. Perhaps, they view it as a waste of resources or believe that they are giving away valuable legal knowledge and insight for free. But, with content marketing costing 62% less than traditional marketing, content creation can be one of the most rewarding and profitable forms of marketing investment. Content creation offers your firm a means to differentiate  itself from competitors in the market and offer your customers added  benefits. 

Step 1: Set Out Your Legal Content Creation Goals

A mistake that many companies make in their marketing strategy is incorporating a marketing channel without understanding the benefits and the company’s own goals for the campaign. Without these objectives, there is no way truly to  tell whether content creation is adding value to your marketing strategy or is simply another added cost.

8 Benefits of Legal Content Creation

1. Makes you stand out from competitors

The American Bar Association found that only 27% of law firms featured a blog on their website. Separate yourself from the competition by offering something that your competitors don’t. When looking online for a legal firm, users will gravitate towards the sites that offer them more.

2. Creates distinctive brand image and identity

Blogs offer an opportunity to show your website visitors who you are. If you are a fun and relaxed firm, demonstrate that in your blog  with colloquial and funny language. If you strive for professionalism at all times, be more formal and authoritative in your writing style. Likewise, the use of images, fonts, and embedded videos can show your audience the kind of company you are.

3. Demonstrates knowledge and expertise

Your blog is your opportunity to show your audience that you know what you’re talking about. By offering insights into the legal world, perhaps raising ideas and points that readers might not have considered, you are proving to them that there is a gap in their legal knowledge, and you are there to offer them that assistance.

4. Establishes trust and reputation

By demonstrating your level of expertise, you establish yourself as a legitimate and trustworthy legal firm. Reputation is everything. By incorporating helpfulness, trustworthiness, and competence into your brand image, your reputation will continue to thrive.

5. Encourages customers to stay engaged

By creating a resource that customers consistently use, you are remaining relevant to them, even after they have used your services. By increasing the number of touchpoints and interactions that you have with a customer, you increase the likelihood that they will continue to stay with your firm.

6. Brings in new audiences

Many users might come to find your website through your blog. By making use of SEO, you increase the likelihood that web users will stumble across your blog when typing something into a search engine. From there, you have gained their interest and can convert them into paying customers.

7. Educates readers on your products or services

Many people feel overwhelmed by the legal world, with its jargon and never-ending technicalities. By providing an educational resource, you can help your audience make sense of various laws and legal terms, which in turn can help them to understand what they need from you and why they need it.

8. Potential for being shared across social media

Social media, alongside content creation, can be an excellent and cost-effective way of reaching your audience. Blog content is often shared on social media – either by the company itself or by people that have read your posts. By encouraging readers to share the blog post online, you reach a wider audience without having to spend a penny.

Now that you understand what you can gain from legal content creation, you can determine your own goals within these and set quantifiable objectives. This way, you can monitor success. For example, you may want to track the number of times the blog is shared online to determine how well the blog is doing at reaching a wider audience. Maybe,  you may want to ask new customers whether they discovered your services through the blog or other routes.

Step 2: Determine Your Target Audience and Topic Areas 

Understanding your existing demographic helps you know the kind of legal content creation you want to focus on. You also want to consider your legal firm’s unique selling points and niches to be able to focus on this in your posts.

Ways to understand your current audience:

• Google Analytics
• Focus groups
• Speak to existing customers
• Ask existing customers to complete a survey

While it is important to understand your existing customer base, it is important also to  consider any new audiences that you might be able to reach through legal content creation. However, you need to ensure that in targeting a new demographic, you don’t isolate the audience you already have. For example, you may  want to harness the powers of the internet and social media to reach a younger, more tech-savvy audience, but you shouldn’t then necessarily tailor your blog style to them. The use of slang, abbreviations, and funky stylization may attract Gen-Z, but it might make an older generation feel that they are in the wrong place.

Step 3: Create High-Quality Legal Content

When striving for the best quality legal content creation, it is important  always remember that you  need to provide value to your readers. This means that you need to aim to produce content that is different from what is already available. Think about where you can offer your niche expertise, while still leaving the reader curious to come to you directly for more.

It is crucial to stay engaging throughout your posts. Go for a format that is broken down into sub-headings and makes use of bullet points or lists, as these are more readable and structured. Stay relevant to the topic you have set out in your headline.

It is also crucial to be aware of Search-Engine Optimisation (SEO) and the value that it can add to your content. Determine the keywords of the content and make sure to refer back to this consistently throughout the post. You should also include this same keyword in your meta descriptions. It may also be beneficial to reference other similar keywords, so that you can  widen the likelihood of your content being found.

To ensure the best quality, it is worthwhile hiring a professional copywriter. This way, you can ensure that the blog is being given full attention by someone qualified and experienced. They will understand how SEO works and how to maximize  content to reach your target audience.

Step 4: Convert Leads

At its heart,  legal content creation aims  to gain more customers. 60% of people are inspired to seek out a product after reading content about it, so it is important to harness that. What you want to avoid is providing free legal content and resources for users who  will  not engage with your business any further. Ultimately, you want the content to pique the reader’s interest or make them understand the value of your legal services, to the point that they will convert to becoming paying customers. 

The best way to do this is with a ‘call to action.’ This is where you encourage the reader to do something, to become an active visitor rather than a passive one. The trick is to make the reader feel that they are gaining something, rather than providing something. You want them to provide their details, discover more about your products, or get in touch with you. However, they are significantly more likely to do this if they see the value in doing so. Look at some of the examples below for inspiration.

Examples of calls to action:

• Encouraging them to provide their contact details
• Linking a survey or quiz to work out what help they need
• Linking a list of your services or products
• Entering their email address to receive a newsletter, email marketing, a free eBook, or a guide
• Encouraging them to call up for an appointment
• Including a ‘learn more’ button
• Offer a discount code in exchange for details
• Link to sign up for a webinar
• Encourage them to share the post on their social media pages

Step 5: Promote Your Content

Once you have created and published your content, you need to make sure that it reaches your desired audience. Without promotion, legal content creation can be a waste of time. Posts will continue to be added to your website without ever being read. The easiest and cheapest way of promoting your legal content is through social media. By sharing the page on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook – alongside a snappy summary of the page’s content – you can reach curious readers. It is worthwhile considering which social media platform is most popular within your target demographic: Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram are more popular with younger users; while LinkedIn and Facebook target more professional and older demographics, respectively.

Another idea might be to pay for Google Ads so that when users type in a related search term into Google, your site will appear as a sponsored link. The inclusion of SEO keywords throughout your content will also optimize your page, increasing the likelihood that it will appear at the top of search results.

Once you have gained that initial visit to your page and have encouraged them to provide their email address, you can then continue to market your content to them. To keep them engaged,  you can send email marketing about your legal services, and notify them about new blog posts that they may be interested in.

Step 6: Monitor, Analyse, Respond

The last step in creating your legal content is monitoring the impact and adjusting your strategy accordingly. Studies have found that measuring your content marketing performance and using the data obtained has a positive influence on the effectiveness of your content marketing. Tools like Google Insights allow you to monitor the traffic to your page and understand how your customers are interacting. Here are some examples of insights:

• How many visitors each post is getting
• The demographic of your visitors
• How customers find your legal content
• What your readers are searching
• The proportion of visitors that are converted into customers

These insights alongside many more that Google has to offer, can allow you to measure the effectiveness of each post, as well as the success of your legal content creation strategy as a whole. By understanding what is working in your strategy, you can continue to replicate this and avoid wasting your time and resources on a marketing technique that isn’t creating results.

An important thing to remember in content marketing is that consistency is everything. It is not enough to simply add a few blog posts to your website and think that customers will continue to seek you out. You need  to consistently provide new, relevant, interesting content to keep your audience engaged. After a while, this can become hard, as you may run out of ideas. This is why it is important to make your posts niche and specific from the offset so that you have more ground to cover.

By following each of these steps, you can harness the power of legal content creation and use it to maximize the success of your marketing strategy. If you create interesting and engaging content and follow it up with a call to action to convert your readers into leads, you can reach new customers and build a relationship of trust.