It’s no longer a matter of choice. Intrinsic to your law firm marketing strategy has to be your firm’s commitment to generate user-centric content. Full stop.
Everyday, via a desktop, laptop, a mobile phone, an iPad, Android and even a television people are consuming information at a phenomenal rate. The internet has become the quintessential information tool, as evidenced by the growing trend of people conducting long tail searches. A long tail search being one that is specifically targeting the information you are trying to locate, as opposed to the use of general terms.
But despite people now wanting good quality information, when it comes to a law firm’s response to the provision of such information, for most firms it still remains incredibly bland. That’s to say, instead of being user-focused in its production and facilitation, it normally is long pieces of text, full of legal terminology. While deconstructing legal rhetoric is easier said than done, it has to become entrenched in your content strategy.
When speaking about content strategy generally, Kristina Halvorson is a terrific resource. According to Kristina, your web content is useless unless it does one or both of the following: –
(a) Supports a key business objective;
(b) Supports a user (or client) in completing a task.
When you’re taking stock of your current web-presence, ask yourself is every piece of content, every page and every form achieving these objectives. Is the site easy to navigate? Are people finding what they’re looking for.
Integral to your law firm marketing strategy has to be the ability to understand the Analytics on your site and of course, the ability to locate any user impediments. For example, we were recently working with a client who understandably thought that the low bounce rate (percentile measure of how long someone is on pages or posts of your site) on their site was a great thing. However, the exit rates were incredibly high, indicating that users more than likely may have become lost and not sure what to do, so they lingered longer, but ultimately exited at alarming rates. Your Analytics is a great place to start, not only in the identification of issues, but of course opportunities as well. What are best performing pages or posts on your website? Is there a possibility of generating more of that content, or writing other unrelated content in a similar way? If you’re convinced that your firm is generating client-focused content but the uptake is low, is there a navigation issue, or does the information need to be broadcasted using a different medium. Is a video warranted instead, or an audio clip, a webinar or screencast?
Content strategy is undoubtedly a complicated undertaking, but when done well pays exceptional dividends. Ideally, a content strategy is the primary derivative of which your web platforms emanate. So, if you’re considering re-design, than most certainly incorporate a content strategy. Conversely, if you don’t want to go down that track of re-design, a content audit may work for your firm.
