Content Creation and Marketing As An Online Business Development Strategy For Law Firms II

December 3, 2019

6 min read

While the content so created should be detailed and layered enough to provide context and all the other above suggestions, it isn’t and should not be styled like an academic essay or a court process. Content created for distribution online should be concise; written using simple language and aimed at answering particular questions, addressing specific issues or delivering particular pieces of news. Far-ranginess, verbosity, and lengthiness should be actively discouraged and avoided. Think of creating content like responding to a client’s inquiries via email. Such a mail would necessarily be limited in length and scope, it would respond to an instant issue and be easily digestible. It would contain actionable information that puts the client at ease. Content created by the firm’s professionals for online distribution should be similarly structured. 

The immediately preceding paragraphs have dealt with the how of structuring content. The act of creating; the putting of pen to paper or finger to keyboard is the subject of this one.

How will the firm’s professionals know what to create? How can they determine the subject matter that their intended audience will find relevant? Introspection, loosely defined, is a good place to start. The activities—email interfacing, legal opinion generation, etc.—that form part of the daily goings-on in the lives of the firm’s professionals will be great sources of original content. Emails will over time house a store of frequent client queries and the responses they receive. Examining, categorizing, and associating these queries and responses will provide insight to frequently asked questions and confusions that clients have and also provide a foundation for creating content aimed at responding to these. The interplay between the firm’s service offerings and activities prevalent in its practice areas can also serve as a pointer to the kind of content prospective clients would find useful. Outsiders (non-firm professionals) whether appearing as interview subjects or guest creators can serve as co-creators or contributors and bring otherwise unavailable wisdom, attention, or credibility. These outsiders can be clients, other legal professionals and members of academia, business figures, critics, observers, or pundits. 

While the firm’s clientele will inevitably contain individuals, businesses are always better for business. In both situations, content created to enable business development should be targeted at the most important people in the pool of potential consumers—financial decision makers. This will be business owners, C-suite or other high ranking executives, general or in-house counsel, management personnel and individuals (their social and legal identity largely determined by the firm’s practice area focus). These persons (except for the general or in-house counsel—a legal professional) bear two characteristics; they are not legal professionals and they are often educated and discerning. Content aimed at piquing their interest should—while necessarily absent excessive legalese and composed in simple language—be written for a high level consumer. Excessively dumbing down the language or writing for the lowest denominator could backfire if the main target audience (financial decision makers) feel underwhelmed, unimpressed or worst talked down to. No matter the case, their engagement with the content will not translate to business development opportunities. Also, merely posting content on legal developments or new legislation as law firms are wont to do will not do much by way of differentiation. Neither will a focus on legal methodology. The intention is to cultivate new business not to serve as a resource place for legal practitioners.

To maximize effectiveness and obtain a satisfactory ROI on the time investment necessary to produce content for them, the audience for which the firm’s professionals create content should be identified, defined, and segmented prior to the performance of any content creation exercises in their favor. This timely identification, definition, and segmentation will provide clarity about for whom the professionals create content. Because they are clear on whom they are creating content for, the content created by the professionals will be experienced as especially beneficial and relevant by their intended audience when they encounter them. By way of example, let us assume that the firm will have a family law practice group, the professionals in this practice group can be reasonably expected to expect to handle different kinds of family-related matters; they will expect to handle divorces and other matrimonial causes, they may expect adoptions. Some of the divorce proceedings will be contested, others won’t be and the underlying reasons for getting divorced will likely differ in each circumstance. On the other side, potential adopters may be individuals, couples, locals, foreigners, a combination of a local and foreigner or even a spouse of the adoptee’s parent. 

While the above example is limited in its scope to a family law practice group, its components; a broad market (family law matters), within-market opportunities (matrimonial causes and adoptions), prospective clients with somewhat similar but clearly unalike conditions or needs (contested and non-contested divorces, adopters with different socio-cultural backgrounds) can be extrapolated and applied to any practice area. Content created in favor of prospective clients should take into consideration and reflect their different circumstances, viewpoints, and expectations. The importance of prior identification, definition, and segmentation in ensuring that this is achieved should be very apparent. This process of identifying, defining, and segmenting the intended audience should not be a one-time effort. It must be ongoing. With time and as long as its professionals continue to publish content, the firm will attract an audience. These persons who will often be repeat users of the service around which the content for which they gather is created, will be great sources of consumer-side insights, feedback, stories, and ideas. Developing relationships with and learning what there is to about these persons will help the firm craft even more client-centric content (contextually) and services (generally). 

Finally, while legal information is still primarily consumed by “reading stuff” law firms are under-utilizing the results pages of search engine queries. Results from search engine queries come back displaying links to among others, text, images, and videos. The search engine trawls websites that host textual, pictorial, and video content containing the searched keywords (in the case of the last two, it focuses on the text in the captions attached to the picture or video), ranks the most relevant of these and then displays the results for the different categories. By making and uploading appropriately captioned videos —with reference to how non-lawyer consumers (prospective clients) of legal information search—the firm would be light years ahead of its peers in using search engines to its advantage. These videos because of the constraints around solicitation created by the Rules of Professional Conduct should be made in a Q&A style. Post employing the methods recommended above, the firm should have a good idea of the questions and confusions that frequently beleaguer consumers and prospective consumers of its services. The videos should feature a professional(s) providing concise, simple answers to these questions. They can be hosted on video hosting platforms and have links to their location embedded on the firm’s website and or blog. These links can then be shared via the firm’s social media pages. Making video content can be very inexpensive with location, noise, and lighting being the biggest concerns, things a properly arranged office can provide and will allow the firm’s professionals show their humanness and personality in a way text based content can’t. Using marketing technology like geo-targeting, these videos can be served to their intended audience exactly where they are found and completely within the Rules too. Incredible!

Culled from "A Millennial's Guide to Building A Law Firm." My new book on Law Firm Management.