Legal marketers, I feel your pain. Your content marketing began a few years ago with lively social media platforms and a busy legal blog. Fee earners were almost queuing up to contribute but over time, you began having to chase.
Slowly but surely, sourcing content started to feel like a chore rather than something productive. Unless you’re careful, quality, consistency and frequency will begin to drop. You don’t have to look too hard to find law firms with Facebook pages last updated in 2011, or Twitter profiles struggling to muster one tweet a month.
If this sounds familiar, don’t despair. The truth is that maintaining momentum in online marketing is much harder than getting started. It’s easy to lose sight of what you’re trying to achieve and allow other projects to take over your time.
Arm yourself with a strategy and a formula
The key is to see content marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy, not as a novelty stand-alone. Develop an integrated marketing plan that can be delivered across all appropriate channels available to you. The same messaging can be adapted for social media, your blog, audiovisuals in your reception area and corporate communications.
Selecting a formula for categorising content is often helpful. Perhaps you want to publish ten LinkedIn posts per month; they don’t all have to feature your original content. Three could be a response to another post on a relevant subject, four could be news coverage and the remaining three could be long-form opinion pieces. Aim for a mix and don’t forget to engage with what others write, including comments.
Similar principles apply to your other channels. Posting too often can cause annoyance, posting too irregularly reduces your impact. As a general rule, aim for a blog post every day or two, a Facebook post every day and several tweets per day.
Try campaign-led marketing
You might decide to divide your marketing year into campaign seasons when you will focus on a particular topical issue. The campaign could demonstrate your expertise on the wider context your clients operate in, for example the impact of a possible UK exit from the EU on small businesses; the future of the UK housing market; how the insurance industry should respond to climate change.
A campaign-led marketing calendar has the advantage of inspiring debate among colleagues, as well as giving you plenty of scope for fresh ideas. The challenge of chasing lawyers for articles should be a thing of the past. Ensure you have a clear follow-up plan for engaging with people attracted to your firm through your campaign, whether as clients, influencers or business partners.
Don’t spread yourself too thinly
Most importantly, focus your resource where it will be most effective and don’t try to do too much. If Facebook isn’t working for you, perhaps you don’t need an account. If long case reports on your blog get zero page views and do nothing for your SEO, it might be that you would be better off skipping them.
You need to be able to maintain your content marketing not just for a few weeks or months, but indefinitely; it’s tough to juggle with all the other demands on a busy legal marketing team. Why not talk to M2 Bespoke about how we could help?