For lawyers, generating case leads was reported as the third most challenging part of their jobs. The two challenges ahead of that were dealing with difficult clients and long hours.

These three challenges could be related. If you don’t get enough clients, you focus less on providing legal expertise and more on finding new clients. You might even settle for clients who just aren’t optimally qualified, leading to longer and harder work hours.

Although it’s often not the top priority for law firms, marketing may become more important when you understand how it improves your legal business overall.

To have more cases you want to work, you need clients who are a good match for your services, right? These clients come in first as qualified case leads.

But where do they come from? This is where a content marketing strategy will help you build an audience and increase your reach. Stop worrying about where your next case comes from. Instead, bring in qualified case leads.

Our list of tips and ideas around content marketing for lawyers is a great place to start from scratch or to pull ideas from that fit into your current marketing strategy. Dig in to see how content marketing will help you capture new case leads.

What is content marketing for lawyers?

Content marketing involves creating and sharing content across several touchpoints with potential clients. This has become easier than ever in the legal industry. 

Your potential clients are already using many of the digital marketing channels where you can share content.

The content is typically free, yet is meant to be valuable to potential clients. Content includes your law firm website, blog posts, ebooks, emails, webinars, videos, infographics, and more. 

A content marketing strategy improves your search engine optimization (SEO) and increases traffic to your website, which generates case leads. It also provides a way to share information and build trust with consumers.

Unlike advertising, which stops when the budget runs out, content is evergreen, lasting many years. It’s worth investing in as a long-term strategy. And the sooner you start, the better you’ll outperform your competition.

How can a content marketing strategy help lawyers generate more case leads?

Content marketing allows lawyers to reach more people with their services. People are looking for legal help online. We want those people, your potential case leads, to find you.

By creating and sharing content across various digital marketing channels, you meet your potential leads where they are and guide them to your services, rather than your competitors.

When you share valuable content, build traffic online, and improve SEO with a content marketing strategy, you make it easy for potential clients to discover the services they need. 

From there, your content stands out by helping people feel comfortable and confident enough to take the next steps. This means you get more qualified cases.

13 content marketing tips for lawyers to capture new case leads

With this basic understanding of the value of creating content, let’s dig into concrete tips and ideas to inspire ways to build and engage with your target audience to generate case leads.

Pick one or two ideas based on your natural strengths and interests and give them a try. 

If you’re ready to dive into more robust efforts in content marketing for lawyers, consider connecting with us to learn how our team can support you.

1. Create a high-quality law firm website for SEO

As you build your target audience across various channels, your website becomes the hub where that audience will ultimately land and become case leads. A website with content that uses strategic law firm SEO helps pull in traffic from search engines.

When a potential lead searches for “legal services near me” or asks a question like, “Do I have a medical malpractice case?” you want content on your website to provide the search results they need. 

With this in mind, your website should include your local SEO content such as your location, practice areas, explanations of services, etc. to help answer these queries.

You want it to be easy for visitors and potential clients to get the information they need and take the next steps to get in touch with you.

2. Blog about your key practice areas

SEO and keyword research boost content marketing efforts but even without these strategic elements, lawyers can create a valuable blog just by sharing what they know.

You’re targeting people looking for your services, so write about the practice areas you’re an expert in.

For topic ideas, think about your practice areas and the common questions you get about them. Write how-to guides, write about legal scenarios, and try to answer questions you often get about the areas where you have legal expertise.

As you begin to write and publish more blogs about these topics, you’ll start ranking in search engines for organic keywords. At this point you don’t have to pay to bid on relevant keywords and show up in digital ads. Instead you’re sharing free content for potential clients, while building traffic for yourself.

3. Research your competitors’ keywords and see what they’re blogging about

If you want to get a little more strategic or even just need more ideas, research your competitors to see what topics they blog about, highlight across their website, or other channels.

Analytics tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Ubersuggest allow you to see things like:

• How much traffic your competitors get
• Which keywords they rank for in search engine results
• The keywords they bid on
• What their top five performing website pages are that bring in traffic

Look at their approach and think about how you can do it better. 

If their blog articles are 1,000 words long, write articles that are 2,000 words long with more in-depth information. Search engines will favor the more valuable content. And this is just one specific example of how you can look to your competitors rather than start from scratch with a completely new strategy.

4. Write a “lead magnet” to collect your readers’ email addresses

Lead magnet is a term we use for valuable downloadable content, like ebooks, white papers, or guides. We call it this because it attracts leads and then collects their email address and other information before giving the free but in-depth/valuable/exclusive download.

The content of the download is usually more substantial than a typical blog post. It needs to be worth exchanging information for so it peaks your potential client’s interest and also offers helpful guidance or information.

This educational content can even help warm a case lead to prepare them to work with you, helping to make them an even more qualified lead.

5. Create an email marketing campaign

As content marketing helps you generate and collect leads, it is also a huge part of successful lead nurturing. 

Many leads who get in touch with you aren’t ready to hire your services immediately. An email marketing campaign makes it easy for you to stay connected.

They’ve provided their email address and opted into your marketing emails. Now you can reach them in their inbox with more valuable information. 

This doesn’t have to be a ton of extra work either. Send them recent blog posts or compile and send other content you’ve been creating and publishing across various channels.

They can refer back to helpful emails, be reminded of your services with each new email, and may even pass particularly informative emails along to their friends or family, providing the potential for referrals.

6. Set up your social media profiles

We mentioned that one benefit of content marketing is using it across various digital marketing channels. Social media accounts are free so why not use them as another platform for your law firm marketing?

They’re an increasingly essential way for businesses to grow their audiences. For lawyers, we definitely recommend having Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. 

Other social media platforms might not be so necessary at this point, but the more the merrier if you have other platforms you enjoy using.

7. Create a YouTube channel

Video content is in high demand.

As you can imagine from your own online browsing experiences, there is a surplus of written content. It has its place but it doesn’t always stand out like other mediums can.

Video on the other hand, is one of the most well-received, popular forms of content. The issue is that some businesses think it’s too expensive or challenging to produce. But audiences are more and more accustomed to quick casual videos.

Start a YouTube channel and post quick and simple videos that answer FAQs you get from clients. Repurpose blog topics and discuss them in videos. Use video to discuss topics with other lawyers or partners you work with, the list of ideas goes on and on.

8. Create helpful and shareable infographics

Part of reaching your case leads where they are involves creating content in various formats. Maybe all of your blog content is missing the mark for more visual learners or it’s just not doing the job to simplify complex information.

Create a shareable infographic on your website, use it in your blogs, emails, videos, and post it on social media. You’ll start to see that the infographic itself is valuable to people as it may be more accessible to quickly interact with than other content. They may even share it with their audiences.

For this reason, make sure your law firm’s brand is included on any visuals with a logo. Also link back to your website so you can collect any potential case leads who’s interest you gained.

9. Host a free legal webinar

With virtual meetings and remote work becoming increasingly normal, there are many software options available for hosting webinars that make it easy to plan, host, track results, and collect case leads from your efforts.

Pick a legal topic you’re an expert in and that you think would attract your target audience. 

For the legal webinar, build in time for FAQs, polls, and other feedback (making the most of your webinar platform’s data collecting features). You’ll learn from your audience and collect valuable information that helps you reach more people in the future.

Also make it easy for attendees to stay engaged with you. Collect their information to gain leads. Give them ways to stay in the know by pointing them to your blog, email newsletter, social media channels, etc.

10. Update your old blog posts to rank better

Over time, after your law firm content marketing efforts start churning, you can see what’s working and what isn’t.

Your blog is a great place to assess this on an ongoing basis. You’ll see which articles perform well because they’re getting the most traffic, people stay on the pages longer, and the posts move up in search engine rankings.

Every few months, take a look at the data using your analytics tools we mentioned before. Consider which blog articles need improvements. Rewrite, expand, and combine underperforming articles to create top performers.

One easy pro tip: Create articles that are yearly guides. Update those guides with new information each year, being sure to change all mentions of the year to the current year, especially in the headline.

For a concrete plan that shows you where to start, check out our 90-Day Plan for Better Lawyer SEO.

11. Write a case study on each of your key practice areas

In addition to creating a landing page for each practice area, and blog content, also create specific case studies so readers can see first-hand what your law firm is capable of doing. 

These can be generalized so they don’t reveal any private information, while still showing how you navigated certain challenges and what outcomes you were able to achieve.

Law firm case studies provide social proof and are essential for getting people to trust you. Case studies can live as a page on your website, or make them downloadable as lead magnets like we mentioned in tip number four above.

12. Send a newsletter about timely legal issues

Beyond sending email campaigns that share your expertise as you compile it and have new content to share, consider sending a newsletter with more of a focus on actual news.

Take advantage of national news coverage to write about timely legal issues that people are searching for, but that don’t have a lot of content to consume yet. 

Show your legal expertise by explaining or providing commentary on legal issues that arise, depending on what is relevant to your practice areas. This might include commentary or clarification for readers about issues happening with national news, major businesses, celebrities, or even changes to various laws that might affect your clients.

13. Repurpose all of your content marketing pieces for new channels

A law firm content marketing strategy is most efficient when you organize your efforts in a way that lets you constantly recycle content from one medium to the next. 

Content can grow from whatever starting point is easiest for you and then spread across all of your digital marketing channels. 

Write a blog post, then turn it into a video, share them both on social media and across email marketing campaigns. 

Using the engagement from each of those channels, shape the content into a webinar. The information you gain from the webinar could help you expand on the topic or spark new ideas for blog posts.

It all works together to gain momentum and become efficient at building and educating your target audience, generating traffic, and collecting qualified case leads.

Could content marketing for lawyers expand your reach?

There are so many ways to approach law firm content marketing. 

When done well, it builds your audience, generates traffic and leads, and ultimately reaches more prospective clients who need your legal services.

This requires producing and publishing various types of content across several channels to optimize how you reach your target audience. 

So as you’ve imagined, managing content marketing for lawyers can be an interesting challenge.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed about where to start, we can help. 

Kaleidico is a law firm marketing agency that has spent nearly two decades building a full range of marketing services with the ultimate goal of generating case leads.

Content marketing is one of our core services. Our team of law firm marketing experts can build a strategic content marketing plan for you and create the content to back it up — and put many of the ideas in this article to use.

Book a discovery session with us. Together we’ll explore how we can help expand your reach so that you can generate more case leads and serve more people.

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash