In today’s saturated marketplace of ideas, many law firms struggle to create content that connects with audiences suffering from information overload. Faced with this challenge, legal content creators have three options: give up, trudge on or get strategic.
To develop valuable, informative and entertaining content, you need a content strategy that leverages your firm’s collective brainpower and experience, while taking into account your resources, finite as they may be. As the old adage goes, it requires working smarter, not harder.
Think Evergreen
There is an important place in every firm’s content marketing strategy for breaking news and updates — a temporal approach to content. But the foundation of your content pipeline should be evergreen content. Evergreen content is content that stands the test of time. It remains relevant. It’s the best way to generate content ROI because it allows you to produce more content for less work, research and cost.
Quality + Timelessness = Evergreen
Content that remains popular over time, and that ranks highly in search engines, is genuinely helpful and actionable. Your clients — and prospective clients — face common challenges that you help them overcome through your work. By pinpointing those common pain points (and opportunities), you can produce evergreen content that will generate traffic and establish your expertise.
It’s the Long Game
Evergreen content helps firm’s solve one of the biggest challenges they face: Keeping up with the relentless demand to produce and publish new content. Firms produce lots of great content, but they often post it, promote it and forget about it. The problem is that only a small sliver of a firm’s audience may see it. And because audiences change frequently — readers drop off and new ones come on board — lots of great content goes unseen, buried in the archives of a firm’s blog.
Who sees a post is driven by what time it is published and distributed, social media algorithms, and other factors outside of a firm’s control. Accordingly, it’s important to re-publish and re-promote evergreen content over time. This can be accomplished by establishing an editorial calendar that schedules posts for regular re-distribution. While many firms resist this strategy for fear of “spamming” their audiences, the truth is that most firms publish and promote their content too little, not too much.
Content marketing is not designed to, nor will it, convert leads immediately. It’s the long game, requiring continuous, long-term engagement. That’s why evergreen content is so important. It’s the glue that holds a long-term content marketing strategy together, allowing it to pay continuous dividends.