[author: Kevin Vermeulen]

Content marketing is more than just a buzzword. With the term thrown around so much, you might be under the impression that anyone can crank out content. But that’s absolutely not the case. Law firm content marketing is just as much a science as it is an art, and it’s more important than ever to get your law firm’s content marketing strategy right.

To ensure you develop and share only the best possible content, we’re going to look at eight of the biggest content marketing struggles law firms face, as well as some practical tips for overcoming those obstacles.

8 Law Firm Content Marketing Challenges & How to Overcome Them

1. Lack of Resources

Content is one thing; quality content is another.

Many small law firms don’t have the funds available to outsource content. While that might be fine some of the time, taking on blogging and other forms of content creation efforts yourself could very well prevent you from completing other equally important tasks.

If you really want your content marketing efforts to take off, you’ll need to invest resources somewhere – either your own time or the money to outsource content creation to someone else. You’re the only person who can determine which of those resources to spare. The biggest mistake would be to not create content at all.

2. More Competition

No matter your area of expertise, there will always be others who have insights to share. It also doesn’t help that your audience’s attention span is more limited than ever. Both factors make content production something of an arms race.

To win that race, you must produce excellent, valuable content and consistently promote it to the right target audience. That means maintaining high standards and making every effort to create content across multiple mediums in addition to your regular blog, such as podcasts or webinars.

3. Meeting Quality Standards

In just about every industry, the need to “Always be Publishing” is lowering content quality standards. Spend some time on the web, and you’re likely to find posts that are too self-promotional, full of errors, or poorly written. This declining quality gives you a real opportunity to provide your audience with the valuable – useful, insightful, and well-written – content they want and need.

But to make the most of that opportunity, you’ll have to do more than merely regurgitate news or current developments in your niche. When you’re writing a blog post or creating other content, dissect the issue for your audience, then provide your opinion and insight into future implications.

4. Getting Your Content in Front of the Right Audience

“Organic” social media promotion will always have its place, but with the digital landscape growing more competitive by the day, even high-quality content might not find its audience. That’s one of the major reasons trends are showing a significant shift toward paid promotion.

If you want to get your content in front of the widest possible audience, you may not be able to avoid paid ads. Fortunately,LinkedIn and Facebook offer a range of increasingly sophisticated ways to segment audiences and reach the right people, for a price. Unfortunately, there’s no real way around this, other than learning. Do some research to determine the best strategy for maximizing your exposure at your budget.

5. Unrealistic Content Marketing Expectations

It’s important to know that content marketing can take a while to be effective. Even the best, highest quality content can take months, or even years, to produce results.

That’s not a flaw in content marketing itself, but rather in expectations. All stakeholders should be comfortable with this fact. The best way to measure your success is to set realistic traffic and engagement targets and review them periodically.

6. Setting a Realistic Publishing Sequence

Hubspot suggests that larger firms publish once per day, while smaller outfits can experience success posting one to four times a month. The problem is, as we covered in point #1, that’s not always an achievable schedule.

If you hope to publish more frequently, you’ll need to devote more resources. If you can’t do that, it’s important to focus on quality over quantity. It’s better to publish one truly excellent post per week than five mediocre ones.

7. Having Too Narrow or Too Broad of a Focus

Many content marketers zero in on a very narrow niche or try to appeal to too many people in a single piece of content. Too broad of a focus won’t do much to position you as a thought leader in your field, while one that’s too narrow won’t do much to expand your audience.

We suggest starting with a broad category relevant to your law firm and then coming up with increasingly granular ideas for potentially applicable subcategories.

8. Measure Return on Investment

Not so long ago, it was nearly impossible to measure the ROI of your law firm’s content marketing efforts. Now, sophisticated analytics make this process much easier – but still far from fool-proof.

It’s important to approach measuring ROI intentionally and with discipline. You can learn more about accurately tracking and reporting on ROI here.

Takeaway:

Though it may be increasingly difficult to produce quality content, it’s more important than ever to do so. Hopefully, this list gives you a few tactics for overcoming some of the common law firm content marketing hurdles.

This post has been edited and republished from Feb. 1, 2021.