The Single Worst Marketing Mistake Lawyers Make

Lawyers who make this mistake are wasting valuable billable time and missing out on new business.

More law firms are blogging because they realize its value for improving the rank of their website in online searches. It’s also the most effective way for lawyers to demonstrate their competence and expertise to potential clients and referral sources, while making their marketing efforts sound more personalized and authentic.

According to Hubspot, marketers who prioritize blogging are 13 times more likely to see a positive ROI. However, it can be a struggle to produce original content on a daily basis and many lawyers assume they don’t have the time to invest in a comprehensive content marketing strategy.

This is the root of the problem for law firm content marketing. The worst marketing mistake law firms are making isn’t that their websites are bad or that they aren’t active on social media. It’s actually that they are neglecting to repurpose their blog content and, therefore, fail to enhance their marketing strategy over time.

Too many lawyers are missing opportunities to increase their visibility and reduce the time they need to spend on marketing because they’re not doing anything to get more mileage out of their content.

Here are simple ways you can use your blog content in other areas of marketing to get more clients:

Bundle related blog articles into ebooks

If you’re consistently blogging, then a lot of your information is likely to get buried over time. A visitor will find one article from a Google search, but they may not find all the related articles that have additional information and useful advice. Publishing an ebook is a great way to fix this problem and produce a great piece of premium content for your website at the same time.

There is no need to spend time writing an ebook from scratch when you can simply identify the recurring themes in your blog articles and bundle a few posts together. Come up with a topic, select 5-7 related articles to support that topic, update the information, edit the copy to make sure it flows together and then format it into an ebook.

At Law Firm Suites, we used 10 of our most popular blog articles to create an ebook called Real Life Solutions to the 10 Biggest Problems of Small Firm Practice. With very little effort we were able to take blog articles published on our site that were written by practicing attorneys and turn them into a useful advice ebook.

You can easily find templates online that will make your ebook look well-designed, but you can also publish it in plain-text and make sure you have a nice cover. The entire process should take less than an hour. Afterwards, you’ll have a valuable piece of content you can use to collect the contact information of your website visitors using a call-to-action and a landing page.

Produce social media posts

Managing a social media presence on multiple platforms sounds difficult until you realize that you don’t always have to draft new posts every day. You can turn the titles and copy of your blog articles into social media posts and include the link to promote them.

The great thing about social media is that it’s constantly updating so you don’t have to come up with original copy for every post if you recycle your previous posts over time. Your followers are unlikely to remember that you tweeted the same sentence two months ago.

Go through each of your articles and take out the most important and compelling points. You should be keeping a master list of social media posts you curated from your blog content that you can schedule out at any time.

Stay in touch with former clients

It’s important to keep in touch with former clients so you can attract return business and stay top of mind for any referrals they give out to their network. You took the time to develop a relationship with your client when you were handling their case so don’t let all that effort go to waste by letting your communication with them end after you’ve finished working on their matter.

An email newsletter is an easy way to stay connected to clients and continue to provide them with value. You can quickly assemble a monthly client newsletter using links to your most recent (or best performing) blog articles. Since you should be blogging about topics that are relevant to your client’s needs and fears, they will be interested in what you’re writing and might really appreciate you for providing them with additional resources.

Create a script for a video

In 2015, video was the most popular format for content marketing and 70% of brands considered it the most effective. Many lawyers struggle with getting video right and producing something that actually gets clients to pick up the phone.

The key to good video marketing is adding value and giving viewers the information they’re looking for. Luckily, you are already doing this with your blog. You can easily take the content from your blog articles and turn them into script for a video.

Take one or a few related blog articles and come up with an outline for how you could shoot a video to tell a story. It might be a good idea to think of some b-roll shots so you have variety in your footage; however, the most important thing is to produce a high-quality video with valuable information. It’s okay if you film yourself talking in front of a camera as long as it looks professional and your advice is useful.

Produce infographics

People love visuals more than they love words. In fact, businesses that use infographics are able to increase their website traffic by an average of 12% or more.

Keep in mind that infographics don’t always have to be data and research-based. They are simply visual representations of important information. You can convert any blog article into an infographic by going through the article and pulling out any important data points, key facts and nuggets of wisdom.

We frequently do this for the Law Firm Suites blog. For example, we published an article on the rise of the legal virtual office that performed very well. As a result, we took the information from that article and created a timeline infographic for the history of the virtual office.

You don’t have to be a graphic designer to produce a good infographic. There are plenty of websites, such as Canva or Vennage, that offer templates or drag-and-drop features that allow you to create your own infographics. You can also outsource this task to someone on Fiverr or UpWork for a low cost.

Create SlideShares

Again, visual content will always be a preferred method for information consumption and it’s processed 60 times faster in someone’s brain than text. You can use nicely-designed templates purchased from websites like Photodune to turn blog articles into presentations and then upload them to SlideShare.

Once you convert your articles into SlideShare presentations, you’ll have great visual content to add to your LinkedIn profile, share on your social media platforms and enhance the blog articles you recycled the content from.

For example, Law Firm Suites founder, Stephen Furnari, was able to turn his Rise of the Legal Virtual Office article into a presentation for a New York State Bar Association CLE on virtual office ethics, which he posted on SlideShare. Afterwards, he was actually able to recycle that presentation into three additional blog articles on defining the virtual law office, defining the ethical virtual office and finding an ethical virtual office in New York. Each of those articles were then turned into SlideShare presentations and YouTube videos.

Having your content on SlideShare will generate referral traffic from the links you embed in your presentation and the description below it. Additionally, housing your content on SlideShare and optimizing it with keywords will make it more likely to appear in search results because of the platform’s site authority.

Find referral sources

Your blog is supposed to help you gain recognition in your practice area, which should lead to new opportunities. For example, solo attorney, Joleena Louis, was interviewed for an article for Passle, a digital marketing software provider, because of the blogging she has done for Law Firm Suites.

Digital marketer Claire Trévien said, “I first came across Joleena Louis through her brilliant blogs over at Law Firm Suites and immediately wanted to find out more about her.”

As more people express interested in you because of your blog, you might be invited to industry events or get offered guest speaking opportunities. In this you case, can recycle your blog content to create presentations for these events.

Additionally, pay attention to the visitors who comment on your blog. Many of them could be potential referral sources or important professional connections. Don’t be shy about reaching out to them to ask for a guest blog post or to work on developing a professional relationship.

Once you start a blog for your law firm, it becomes more than just a blog. It’s actually one of the most valuable foundational tools for marketing because your blog articles can be reused for other marketing efforts.

Attorneys must realize they can accomplish most other marketing tasks in half the time by recycling and re-purposing their blog content. This is the most effective time-saving tip you can incorporate into your marketing strategy.