This is the third and final post in our series on building a law firm content marketing strategy. The first two covered audience and content production. This one covers the part that determines whether any of it was worth the effort: building law firm content that converts readers into clients, and knowing whether you’ve done it.
Plenty of firms publish content that performs well by every metric except the one that matters. The traffic climbs, the email list grows, and not a single new matter comes through the door. That gap is the subject of this post.
How Will Your Content Support Your Business Development Efforts?
Your content, when it is functioning correctly, will bring your website traffic and email subscribers. This is good, but until you confirm these things are leading to paying clients, you haven’t achieved the goal. A real law firm content marketing strategy needs to monetize through signing new clients. Here is how to make sure your content brings you a paying audience.
Make it obvious you’re a law firm
You might think it’s obvious that you’re writing content to get new clients, but to the person who found you through a Google search, it is not. The reader probably arrived through search, and they are busy. You need to make it very clear, and often, that your site is a law firm that offers legal services. There are various ways of doing this, some more intrusive than others. Consumer sites often include AI bot interfaces, but most law firms will shy away from that tactic.
Own your content’s home
You can also signal your content’s relationship to your practice in quieter ways. The blog should live on your website rather than on Substack or another content platform. You can and should use other platforms to promote yourself, but beware the trap of building your content on somebody else’s real estate. For the same reason, do not give your blog its own subdomain. Use a folder on your main domain instead.
Tie content back to your services
In your templates, refer to your firm by name. That means the firm’s name in the header, footer, and sidebar. Offer free consultations, testimonials, or other social proof where available. Most importantly, do not shy away from contextual calls to action. If you are an employment attorney writing about updating employee handbooks, include a call to action about your services helping employers update their employee handbooks. The reader who needed that exact thing is the reader you want to catch.
Capture email addresses early
You should also include a means of capturing email addresses or phone numbers. Most visitors to your content will not be ready to hire an attorney. If you are lucky, they will need the services later. Collecting an email address early makes your attribution efforts much easier down the line, and it establishes a relationship with the reader so they know where to go if and when the time comes to hire.
Frame the offer as a kit, not a newsletter
Sometimes the way you frame your email content can be helpful. A newsletter sounds like a regular email of very low value, and that is because most newsletters are exactly that. If you frame your content instead as a multi-step instruction kit for accomplishing something, you may get more clients out of it. A five-email sequence offering a step-by-step manual for compliance with California employment laws will likely be more interesting to an employer who will someday need an employment attorney than a general newsletter with no end date in sight. Once you have gotten a potential client to sign up for a how-to sequence, you can transition them into an occasional newsletter.
When a newsletter is the right call
Short on time? An email sequence not possible right now? Then stick with a newsletter. A good newsletter can still work. Just be conservative with how many emails you send, and make sure the content is always top notch. Readers appreciate knowing how often they will hear from you, and they learn quickly which sources send too many emails. Those are the ones they unsubscribe from.
Use premium content to earn the signup
When you want somebody to subscribe, it helps to offer premium content as a lure. Research studies, ebooks, and case studies are all good for generating leads. Place them inside articles on relevant topics. As your content library grows, you will have plenty of opportunities to go back through old posts and link to related material.
Build a follow-up system
Finally, create a system for following up with prospects. As your practice grows, you need a process for staying in touch with the people your content brings in. Marketing automation can handle this in the beginning, but as you gather information from users, you will eventually need a real intake process so you can actually consult with them.
How will you know when your content is working?
Creating content is in some ways a leap of faith. It is hard to turn content into revenue, and it is harder still to prove afterward that you did. Establishing a means of reporting will guide your future efforts. By measuring a post’s traffic, keyword rankings, newsletter sign-ups, and the like, you can figure out which tactics are not working and which ones deserve more of your time and attention.
Track traffic growth month over month
The clearest signal is traffic growth from month to month. Aim for roughly six percent total traffic growth month over month, which means you need to be tracking your traffic from month one. Most of that traffic should come from organic search. If you are publishing keyword-targeted content, you should see your organic search traffic increase every month. Another way to gauge whether your content is doing real work is to watch for backlinks from other sources.
Put your tools in place from day one
Keep in mind that content marketing generally takes a long time to deliver results, which is exactly why tracking your stats from day one matters so much. You will need Google Analytics, or some other traffic tracking mechanism, in place the moment your blog launches. You will also need tools for SEO and keyword research, and a way to send a newsletter. And you will want your content to look good, with graphics where the subject calls for them.