Clients are won because they trust you and, having put their trust in you, you help them be successful. In the legal world that trust is won through building up personal relationships.
You all knew this already. However, don’t forget that building up those relationships is a mixture of face to face time between individuals but also and very importantly effective content.
Your clients want convenience, expertise, efficiency and a successful outcome to whatever issue it was on which they first instructed you. The decision to instruct you is often not made by one person but several. It takes time and nurturing.
Therefore keeping the name of an individual/the organisation in the eyeline of clients is fundamental to securing the next instruction. There are a great many other lawyers out there who also want your slice of the pie! You need to stand out from the crowd and show clients that you are the person/organisation of choice in your particular field/s. There is a limit to the number of coffees/lunches you can engineer.
So one of the other ways you can keep on your (prospective) clients’ radar is to have an effective content management strategy.
This will take some investment, largely of time, but it is not creating a process just for the sake of it. It is about being more effective in bringing in and retaining clients. It is about differentiating your organisation from others and making you the obvious first choice for clients in your particular markets.
How to start
If you want to attract the decision makers, you need to know what their needs, pain points and interests are. Do you really know this at the moment? Or are you simply churning out content based on the work being done internally? This is not to say that this will not be of interest but are you formulating it in ways which will attract new clients and retain existing ones?
1. Research your target audience. This sounds so obvious doesn’t it but how many of us have actually done this properly – and regularly? It takes time and money but it will repay itself many times over if done properly. Some of the ways to do this are:
- Review your client base, select sample clients and conduct some client interviews.
- Conduct market research to identify trends and client behaviour.
- Analyse your competitors and their client base.
You can, of course, do all this internally but external help may speed up the process. If you already have a client listening programme (see my earlier article – (2) Client experience – the buzzword of 2022 | LinkedIn) then you may have much of this information already.
2. Create the ideal client/s. What are their needs, wants, interests and pain points? What are the stumbling blocks to them using you? What sort of language will they respond to? If you are aiming at non-lawyer clients then using Latin tags and legal terms of art is going to switch them off immediately. How will a particular ideal client want to engage with you? What sort of content will they engage with most? What sort of search terms will they be using to find help with the problems on which you could assist?
3. Identify your objectives. Some of the objectives you could consider are:
- Increasing customer engagement
- Improving customer experience
- Improving profile
- Increasing web traffic
- Increasing enquiries
At this point many people would start talking about KPIs. Personally, if you are just starting out with a content marketing plan, I would encourage you not to become fixated on data! One of my articles on LinkedIn explains why I feel this ((2) Why you need to keep posting and not get hung up on the data | LinkedIn). Certainly discuss how you are going to assess whether you are meeting your objectives (note I have not said “measure”) and looking at data (eg web traffic, increased telephone enquiries) will undoubtedly form part of this. However, if you have done your research and are posting good content regularly then you will be reaching your target audience but not necessarily seeing this reflected in hard data from websites etc. Don’t become fixated, for example, on website visitor traffic which can vary according to all sorts of external factors completely beyond your control.
In other words, a flow of regular, excellent, targeted content is what you need to focus on. And the good news is that this is easily achievable if you put a content marketing strategy into place.
4. Identify your internal resources and their strengths. There is no point in setting up a strategy you are going to be unable to deliver. Where can you realistically meet the strategy internally and where might you have resource gaps by dint of experience, time or both (eg in digital communications, client listening etc). Budget obviously plays a part here but trying to do everything internally may be setting you up to fail.
5. Agree on the content you are going to produce. The most effective content formats in the legal market are:
➤ Email newsletters. Email campaigns have the advantage of directly reaching your existing client base (who may also forward them on). Also whether they are read or not, someone will see your name in their inbox so you will have raised your profile in that way. Some words of warning though. First, newsletters are demanding of people’s time and need to be regular. Do you have enough people willing to run one? If you start in enthusiasm and then run out of steam then there will be no enduring benefit. Secondly, the legal market is awash with newsletters so what is going to make yours more useful/interesting to read?
➤ Case studies. These can be put out via the website and social media so are an attractive proposition. However, don’t forget this is another area in which the legal market is awash. This does not mean that you should not run them, quite the contrary, but how can you make them more interesting and immediately appealing? Lawyers have a tendency to make things quite long and overly lawyerly!
➤ Video content. These days we should all be trying to include video content as part of our offering. It is widely reported that this is one of the most popular ways of consuming content and having video content on your website increases SEO. There are few people who relish being in front of the camera but, if my experience of Zoom is anything to go by, the more you do it, the more you realise that you don’t need to worry. In addition video content can range from the high quality (and more expensive to produce) to the relatively cheap (an edited Zoom session). Ideally you should be looking to have some high quality “evergreen” videos on your website (eg concerning recruitment) as well as more regular, lower cost videos (eg of webinars).
➤ Blog posts. Not something legal organisations tend to go for but many individual lawyers run very successful blogs. Certainly something to consider.
➤ Podcasts. Like videos, podcasts can range from the perfectly produced to the slightly more homespun and everything in between. As with video, I would recommend a bit of both.
➤ Infographics. Don’t forget you can repurpose other content as an infographic. Infographics do not seem to be a big part of the legal offering but research proves clients like them. This could be an opening for you.
6. Set up regular reviews and reporting. These do not have to be long reports that nobody reads. Work out what suits you and your organisation best.
7. Make sure the whole organisation know how things are going. Good communication will build buy in. Lawyers are busy people but they will be first to volunteer if they think they can make more money!
If you would like to discuss any of the content of this article further, then please do get in touch.