Is your content marketing strategy not working for you?
You’re not alone.
Research shows that 60% of marketers struggle to create engaging content and measure the effectiveness of their current content marketing strategies.
Today, we’ll look at the key strategies your personal injury law firm should be using in your content marketing efforts to increase conversions.
1. Understand Your Target Audience
Your content marketing strategy will work best when you gear your content toward the type of potential clients you want to attract. When content is too general, it fails to resonate with them.
Creating a client persona lets you define the characteristics of your existing client base to help you go after more people who fit the same mold. Information to help you create a client persona includes:
- Demographics (age, location, education level)
- The problem they’re trying to solve
- The type of devices they’ll use to consume information
- Will they be searching for the information themselves or will someone else do it for them?
It’s worth noting that you should write content in a way that your potential client will understand and become engaged to read further. Writing in legalese will only alienate your target audience. Instead, try using examples they can relate with.
When you understand what drives your potential clients, you’ll be able to create content that addresses their goals and challenges. You’ll also be able to help them to trust you and encourage them to contact your firm once they’re ready.
For example, let’s say your focus is on faulty medical devices and there’s a case on faulty knee replacement. Your potential client will be someone who’s had a faulty knee implant placed. But who is this person that’s coming to see you?
You could have seen the occasional young person involved in a freak accident where they needed a knee replacement but was faulty.
It could also be that most of your cases in the past and those you’d like to attract in the future revolve around individuals between the ages of 55 to 70 and they’ve had a faulty knee replacement.
Once you’ve narrowed down on the age, you can keep going to answer if they’re married, have kids, their values and so forth. The next step is to give your client persona a name, which will serve as your profile for targeting these readers and their referral sources such as their tech-savvy kids.
2. Develop a Content Strategy
To get the most out of your content marketing efforts, understand your marketing and business goals. After this, create content that serves these goals. Your blog posts, ebooks, podcasts, advertising, and email marketing should all fit into that bigger picture.
You’ll need a strategic framework to get the most out of your hard work and time. This is why it’s crucial you develop a content plan. It will help you to discover and create website content that will benefit your target audience-and your practice.
A good content plan should cover content that you’ll write for that year. It should contain your goals, objectives, milestones, number of practice areas your content will cover and deadlines. You can also break down bigger projects into smaller tasks.
Every personal injury law firm has its own unique needs so there is no one size fits all way of developing a content strategy. However, you should build content based on:
- Your practice area
- Competitor analysis
- Local analysis
- Demographics
- Keyword research and analysis
3. Use Content to Drive Leads through the Sales Funnel
Your content needs to be remarkable enough to convert page visitors into clients. The sales funnel is your sure ticket to help you create user-driven content. It consists of three key stages including awareness, consideration and decision stages.
Top of the funnel stage
The top of the funnel stage is also called the awareness stage. At this point, your potential clients are figuring out about your personal injury law firm.
The goal of this stage is to make them aware of your firm’s existence, not to make a pitch. Therefore, using our earlier example, content should be directed to people who have been hurt but don’t know if it was by the knee implant or know that the knee implant is the cause of their pain but have no idea whether they can sue.
The types of content that work well at this stage include blog posts, ebooks, video content, infographics, and social media content. You should also integrate Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section on your website.
Middle of the funnel stage
Once you’ve created awareness for your law firm the next step is to build interest. Here, potential clients are considering if they should engage with you or not.
On the other hand, you are getting information about them using lead magnets, free consultation or anything to capture their email address so you can squeeze them down the funnel.
Your content marketing efforts at this stage should be geared towards targeted offers and follow-up campaigns for specific client personas. Your main goal is to strengthen the relationship so that potential clients can connect with you.
Using the faulty knee implant example, the potential client who realized that the knee implant was the reason for all the pain can be moved into the middle of the funnel stage using education.
In contrast, the potential client who wanted to know if they are entitled to compensation are case curious and can easily be persuaded into the last stage using case studies that highlight your expertise.
The best content for this stage includes expert guides, webinars, successful case results, client testimonials as well as online reputation management efforts such as responding to negative online reviews.
Bottom of the funnel stage
This is the decision-making stage where your potential client is researching the benefits of your services and how easy it is to contact you.
It’s worth noting that this will also be an emotional stage for them. They have been hurt and realize that they may have a case but want to know this for sure.
Some potential clients will need to be convinced that suing is actually the right thing to do. Others will be ready to sue but they don’t know why they should choose you over your competitors.
As you can see your marketing strategies here need to be equally emotional and targeted to your client’s specific needs. This is where all the efforts you put when coming up with a client persona will start to pay off.
You have to separate yourself from your competitors by proving to your potential client that you get where they are coming from and you are in it for them. Case studies and testimonials with a call to action are effective types of content you can use at this stage.
4. Pay Attention to Your Keyword Research
93% of all online experiences start with a search engine. Keyword research is not what it used to be as search engines have become more sophisticated and can pair content to user intent.
Semantic search is search based on intent, it seeks to understand language the way a human would. The rise of voice search has led to the evolution of semantic search. The question to guide your keyword research here should be, “What phrases will your target audience use doing an online search?”
- Injuries
People will go online to learn more about their injuries. They are likely to use terms that their medical provider used. Therefore, content should be developed around the types of injuries that your potential clients could be searching.
- Economics
Your potential clients will also have to deal with the economic outcome of their injuries. This could be medical bills or lost time at work to create content that offers answers to these economic questions.
- Insurance
Injury victims will also have to deal with insurance companies such as claim denials and filing claims. Target keywords related to their questions on these issues.
Once you understand user intent, you’ll realize that some keywords will have a higher search volume compared to others. You might want to rank for keywords that are relevant to the services you offer. A good example of keywords for your Services pages could be “dog bite lawyer” or “car accident lawyer”
On the other hand, it will be hard to rank for these highly competitive keywords for your blog posts. Long-tail keywords are the ones you want to target at this point. For example, you can use a variety of long-tail keywords to target for different types of car accidents such as “hit and run lawyer near me” or “best car accident lawyer near me”
5. Improve the Visual Aspects of Your Content
Research shows that when people hear information, they are likely to remember only 10% of that information after three days. When you include a relevant image to the same information, they will retain 65% of the same information three days later.
Leverage on visual storytelling because 90% of the information that gets to the brain is visual. Attention spans have become shorter than ever due to the oversaturation of digital content and an increase in mobile users.
Use high-quality and relevant images to split up a body of text in your blog posts. Infographics are also great options for helping your readers to get a quick grasp of issues and they are highly shareable. Use infographics to explain complex ideas and processes such as this one.