Online legal marketing efforts typically consist of a thin website or a blog that collects dust.  You’re all fired up about “getting online,” that you forget one critical point – if you’re using your website as a brochure filled with platitudes and hollow verbiage then why would someone ever consider hiring you?

Answer – they wouldn’t.

Consider the text of this website, created by an excellent law firm with high hopes for a killer online legal marketing effort:

<name of firm> is a full-service <location> bankruptcy law firm providing legal assistance to individuals and families in <area of practice>. As a <location> Board Certified Bankruptcy Attorney, <name of lawyer> has the legal knowledge, experience and resources to help you, just as he and his legal team have helped thousands of clients.

Your may now proceed to enter your name and location in that paragraph.  Once you’ve done that, substitute the name of your closest competitor.

Can you tell the difference?  I didn’t think so.

It’s boring and doesn’t provide any useful information.  Online legal marketing at the lowest possible level, indeed.

The rest of this lawyer’s site is filled with similarly empty-sounding paragraphs, providing zero substance and consisting of the online legal marketing equivalent of a brochure.

There’s no meat on those bones.  Nothing’s there but something for the dog to gnaw on.

Online legal marketing, if it’s going to be effective, must be formed around a content-based strategy.  That’s anathema to most lawyers because there’s still that annoying voice in their head that says:

If you give prospective clients a ton of information for free, why would they pay you for it?

It’s a point I used to brush off, dismissing the concerns as those of dinosaurs who refused to embrace the “new rules”of online legal marketing as it progressed from a one-dimensional brochureware approach to an interactive and content-based strategy.  But as with the stock market and the world of business, the old rules are exactly the same as the new ones.  The only difference is that the new rules wear more stylish clothing.

My law practice has engaged in online legal marketing  using a content strategy for 5 years, and it’s paid off in myriad ways: people come to me with more information under their belt, a sense of confidence in my abilities and, to a large extent, a level of preparation I’d never seen before I started marketing my law firm with content.

More to the point, they’re pre-sold on my services – I don’t need to quibble over legal fees or convince them that I’m the right choice.  They’ve already gotten to the point where they have made the decision on their own, which is far more effective than trying to sell them.

This isn’t a “new rule” of marketing your law firm.  None of this stuff is particularly new, in fact.  It’s easier to get a client when you’ve had the opportunity to educate and convince that person about the need for, and value of, your services.

Online legal marketing strategies consist of nothing more than a using a new platform.  The Internet enables you to get it done more effectively and on a larger scale than pressing the flesh or direct mail. All we’re doing here is using a new delivery mechanism for reaching out and educating people.

Here are my top 11 reasons why online legal marketing efforts must be centered around the creation of real content instead of marketing fluff:

1. Content informs people about the basics before they pick up the phone to call you for an initial meeting;
2. Your online legal marketing efforts need to be designed to prove that your law firm is well-educated in solving client needs, and can communicate those solutions effectively;
3. When you show how much you know, you don’t need to tell your prospective clients about your competence – the proof is in the pudding;
4. Informative content gets passed along from one person to the next, providing exposure to more people than would otherwise be possible using other marketing techniques;
5. When your law firm creates useful content – not fluff – it helps you learn more about it even if you’ve been practicing law for years;
6. Valuable content allows your online legal marketing efforts to weed out those people who do not need your help – someone reads your stuff, they realize the solution you offer isn’t for them, and they move on without wasting your time or theirs;
7. Providing information as the basis of your marketing efforts gives people the ability to do some of the “grunt work” that you’d like them to do before meeting with you.  Stuff like writing a letter to a debt collector to stop contacting them, initiating an effective credit reporting reinvestigation request, or putting together all of the documents they’ll need to start a bankruptcy case.  Why would you not want them to do this legwork before coming to you in the first place?
8. While you’re marketing your law firm by providing valuable information, others are marketing with the bland and forgettable 30 second TV spot (and people are skipping it to hit the bathroom or grab a snack);
9. Creating a blog post, article or other form of content takes time but no money;
10. You can re-purpose your content by taking blog posts and turning them into an ebook or informational package to provide to clients, so you can create it once and spin it out to use over and over again;
11. More content marketing = more search engine saturation = higher placement on the search engines = more traffic to your website or blog = more clients = more money.

So here’s my question for you: if you’re not using a content market strategy, why not?  What’s getting in your way?  And how can we break down those roadblocks to make you more successful?

Photo courtesy of badgerxx.