If content begins by listening, then this is the perfect season to have your ears perked. Holiday parties and year end wrap up meetings are ideal settings for content to originate. As you mix and mingle at holiday gatherings over the next few weeks, ask insightful questions and let the answers guide your content calendar. What are your clients’ and prospects’ pain-points? What opportunities do they see for their companies in the coming year? What industry changes are on the horizon? These are your topics. This is where you start to create content your audience craves for 2019.
Sure, you probably work on content year-round, but is your content working for you? With over 4 million google searches every minute, your content needs to stand out from the crowd in order to be seen. Whether it’s a presentation at a conference, a new article or blog post, an interview, or even your monthly newsletter, you want to give your audience something they care about.
Here’s how you’re going to satisfy their content craving:
- Identify your firm’s strategy or unique message. How will you relate it to your practice and industry areas? Become a thought leader in your space so clients, prospects, and referral sources come back time and again.
- Find out what your audience wants to know. Use surveys, google search queries, discussion boards, team brainstorm sessions and good ole’ word of mouth to investigate what questions you can answer. These are the topics you can pull from. TIP: create topic groups from your investigation results. Group like subjects together to create more well-rounded content.
- Once you’ve picked a topic, tell a story. Make your clients the characters and take them on a journey that ends with a solution for their problems. Throughout the story, appeal to the reader’s emotional side. We know lawyers love using numbers and logic, but that’s isn’t always memorable to the reader who is exposed to over 10,000 brand messages per day.
- Finally, be sure that your content is reaching your audience. It’s no longer enough to just create a blog post and let it sit on your website for someone to stumble upon. Put your content in front of people who care by using email marketing, social media, secondary publishing sites, and even paid ad formats.
We know creating content can sometimes be like pulling teeth. It seems overwhelming, especially when you don’t know where to start. Law firms of all sizes can follow these steps to become content machines – pumping out original, or curated, relevant substance and using it to drive sales, referrals and name recognition. Don’t let your content continue to under-perform. Rethink your approach and investment in content and become the go-to voice in your industry.
More on the 360-degree content strategy by Deborah McMurray here.