Content Marketing: What Is It? Where Do I Start?

The concept of “content marketing” has grown increasingly popular over the last few years. While many of my law firm contacts tell me they have heard of the term, they still have questions about it.

• What exactly is content marketing?
• Do I need to be doing it?
• Where do I start?

What exactly is content marketing?
As its name suggests, content marketing is all about providing relevant content to potential clients, referral sources and existing clients. Rather than just claiming to have a long list of qualifications and experience, law firms and attorneys actually demonstrate their expertise through articles, blogs, webinars, videos and social media posts. The objective of content marketing is to gain your target audience’s attention and trust by providing them with information they actually want and need.

Do I need to be doing it?
With increased competition for work, modern marketing initiatives such as content marketing can provide a significant advantage in business development for law firms today. While there is still a place for traditional marketing means (i.e.print advertisements, sponsorships, press releases, logo items), law firms must include content marketing strategies to remain relevant in a hyper-competitive legal environment. Traditional marketing may raise awareness of your firm, but is content marketing that will engage your target audience and drive profitable results.

Where do I start?
The best place to get started is to learn more about content marketing. After spending countless hours researching content marketing, I have learned the most from those who do it well. Being able to identify and emulate quality content marketers is a great place to start. Here are a couple of places to find good information:

Content Marketing Institute

Content Marketing Institute website link
Providing a good definition of content marketing and several useful guides to assist in your learning process, I have found the information on CMI’s site to be helpful. Lawyers may need some help adapting this site’s general approach to legal marketing, but the essentials are available on this site.

Hinge Marketing

Hinge Marketing website link
Between their Blog (Professional Services Marketing Today) and Library, Hinge Marketing has an incredible amount of educational and practical information available for free review and download. As a market research company, Hinge offers a number of very useful studies about the habits and preferences of professional services buyers.

Hubspot

Hubspot website link
Hubspot offers a turnkey on-line marketing solution. While their website is informative in its own right, the information found in their blogs is top notch. Hubspot also offers quality content and a number of helpful downloads, including graphics templates and other information to improve the appearance of distributed content.

While all of the content on these sites is free, it should be noted that it will take an email address and potentially the completion of a short survey to download content from these content marketers. In some cases, consumers of this content may be directly contacted about the services offered by these marketers.

⇒ Stayed tuned for future articles and posts which will discuss essential resources, relationships, and tips for enhancing your content marketing strategy.