10 Essential Elements To Build Into Your New Year Content Marketing Strategy
5 November 2024
It’s hard to believe we’re now talking about 2025, but as it’s fast approaching, now’s the time for action! This is why we’re urging legal and professional services firms to start building their new year content marketing strategy, so they can start the year off with the best possible chance of success.
An effective content marketing strategy not only helps increase visibility, but also positions your firm as a thought leader, builds trust with potential clients, and drives business growth. However, creating a successful strategy requires careful planning, which is why we’re sharing our 10 essential elements to build into your new year content marketing strategy.
These tips are designed to help legal and professional services firms establish themselves as trusted authorities, attract high-quality leads, and enhance their overall online presence.
1. Understand Your Audience
The first and most important thing for any content marketing strategy to succeed is developing a deep understanding of your target audience, from their needs, wants and fears to their online habits. Legal and professional services clients are often looking for specific expertise to address their unique problems. So, your content should reflect that understanding.
How to Learn About Your Audience
- Develop client personas: Create detailed profiles of your ideal clients, including their industry, job title, challenges, and goals. The more detailed your personas are, the better targeted your content will be.
- Segment your audience: Not all clients have the same needs, so segment your audience into different categories. If you’re a B2B firm, this may be based on factors like industry, company size, or legal needs. If you’re a B2C firm, this may be based on their age, financial situation, or location. Segmentation allows you to tailor your content to the specific concerns of each group.
- Use data-driven insights: Leverage data from website analytics, client surveys, and social media to gain insights into the content topics and formats that resonate most with your audience.
By truly understanding your audience, you can create content that speaks directly to their needs, wants and fears, helping you stand out from competitors.
2. Define Clear, Measurable Objectives
Every content strategy needs clear and measurable objectives before you begin planning your content. You need to ensure that whatever content you create, it’s aiming to achieve one of your goal. The objectives you set should be aligned with your firm’s broader business goals and provide direction for your content efforts throughout the year.
How to Set Objectives
- Align with business goals: Whether you’re aiming to attract new clients, build brand awareness, or increase engagement with existing clients, your content marketing strategy should directly support these goals.
- Use SMART goals: Ensure that your goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For example, a goal might be to “increase organic website traffic by 25% in the first six months.”
- Track key performance indicators (KPIs): Identify relevant KPIs, such as website traffic, lead generation, and conversion rates, that will help you measure the success of your content marketing efforts.
Setting clear objectives will give your new year content marketing strategy focus and ensure that your efforts are aligned with measurable outcomes.
3. Conduct a Content Audit
Before planning new content for the upcoming year, it’s important to evaluate your existing content. A thorough content audit helps you identify which pieces of content are performing well, which need improvement, and where there are gaps in your content library.
How to Conduct a Content Audit
- Assess content performance: Use analytic tools to assess the performance of each piece of content. Pay attention to metrics like page views, time on page, bounce rates, and social shares to determine which topics and formats resonate most with your audience.
- Identify gaps: Review your content to identify any gaps in your current strategy. Are there emerging trends in your industry that you haven’t covered? Are there common client questions that aren’t addressed in your existing content?
- Repurpose high-performing content: Identify evergreen content that can be updated or repurposed for the new year. For example, a successful blog post on no fault divorce could be transformed into an infographic or video series.
Conducting a content audit will help you maximise the value of your existing content and ensure your new content aligns with your strategy.
4. Prioritise Thought Leadership
For legal and professional services firms, positioning yourself as a thought leader is critical to building trust and credibility with potential clients. Thought leadership content allows you to showcase your expertise, offer insights into complex legal or professional issues, and demonstrate your ability to solve clients’ problems.
How to Build Thought Leadership Content
- Include in-depth content: Include long-form articles, whitepapers, or case studies into your plan, that provide comprehensive insights into key legal or industry-specific issues. This type of content allows you to showcase your expertise in more depth.
- Offer unique perspectives: Source individuals that can offer unique perspectives on industry trends, regulatory changes, or new legal precedents.
- Participation in industry discussions: Remember to add into your strategy how you’re going to expand your reach by contributing to guest articles in industry publications or participate in panel discussions and webinars. Develop a plan of how you’ll find and reach out to these organisations.
Thought leadership content will help you differentiate your firm and build long-lasting relationships with clients who value expertise and insight.
5. Develop a Content Calendar
Consistency is key to effective content marketing. A content calendar helps ensure that you publish content regularly, stay organised, and plan ahead for important dates and events.
How to Create a Content Calendar
- Map out key dates: Start by identifying important dates, such as industry related dates, events, and awareness days that are relevant to your firm’s clients. Create content around these key moments to ensure your firm is addressing timely topics.
- Plan regular content updates: Plan your content frequency, whether it’s weekly blog posts, monthly newsletters, or quarterly whitepapers. Consistency helps build trust with your audience and keeps your firm top-of-mind.
- Diversify content types: Incorporate a mix of content types, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, and webinars, into your calendar to keep your audience engaged.
A well-organised content calendar will help your firm stay on track and ensure that your content marketing efforts are both timely and relevant.
6. Embrace SEO Best Practices
Search engine optimisation (SEO) plays a crucial role in driving organic traffic to your website. By optimising your content for search engines, you can improve your visibility and ensure that potential clients can find your firm when they search for legal or professional services.
How to Build SEO into Your Content Strategy
- Conduct keyword research: Use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to identify the search terms your potential clients are using. Focus on long-tail keywords that reflect specific legal or professional issues.
- Optimise on-page SEO: Ensure your content includes relevant keywords in the copy, headings, and meta descriptions. Additionally, create internal links to related content on your site to help search engines understand the structure of your website.
- Build backlinks: Earn backlinks from reputable industry publications, legal blogs, and business directories. Backlinks from trusted sources improve your website’s authority and boost your rankings in search engine results.
By embracing SEO best practices, your firm will be more likely to appear in search results when potential clients are looking for expertise in your field.
7. Leverage Video and Visual Content
Video and visual content are the essential elements of modern content marketing strategies. For legal and professional services firms, videos and visual content can make complex topics more accessible and engaging for potential clients.
How to Incorporate Video and Visual Content
- Consider video topics: Consider which topics would work best in video form. This could be to explain complex processes, or feature to your clients.
- Consider infographics: Consider what data research you can undertake to create visually appealing infographics that are easy to digest and share. Infographics are a great way to communicate information quickly and can be shared on social media or included in blog posts.
- Consider webinars: Webinars allow you to engage with potential clients in real time and demonstrate your expertise on specific topics. Consider what topics you could host webinars on and who can host them. Webinars help attract new clients and build relationships with existing ones.
Video and visual content add variety to your content marketing strategy and can help engage a broader audience.
8. Incorporate Client-Centric Content
The most successful content marketing strategies focus on addressing the specific needs and concerns of your clients. Rather than simply promoting your services, plan content that speaks directly to your clients’ challenges and offers solutions.
How to Incorporate Client-Centric Content
- Address common questions: Plan content that answers common questions your clients may have. For example, a blog post titled “What to Expect During a Business Audit” could be useful for clients in need of financial consulting services.
- Offer practical advice: Include content that offers actionable tips and strategies that clients can implement. A law firm might publish a guide on “How to Prepare for an Inquest”.
- Share case studies: Plan how you will source case studies and what formats they can be developed in. It may be some clients are happy to take part in a video, some perhaps a podcast. It might be that some are happy for their success stories to be shared, but anonymised. These real-world examples provide social proof and help potential clients understand how your services can benefit them.
By focusing on your clients’ needs, you’ll create content that resonates with them and positions your firm as a trusted partner.
9. Leverage Email Marketing
Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways for legal and professional service firms to nurture leads and build relationships with potential and existing clients. By integrating email marketing into your new year content marketing strategy, you can stay top-of-mind with your audience and deliver valuable content directly to their inboxes.
How to Leverage Email Marketing
- Segment your email list: Plan the segmentation of your list into groups. This allows you to send targeted emails that are relevant to each segment of your audience.
- Provide valuable content: Plan the content that you can include in your email newsletters. Make sure the content you plan for each email provides value to the recipient, whether it’s through educational content or exclusive offers like consultations or webinars.
- Automate follow-ups: Plan the automated follow-ups to the email campaigns. This is to follow up with leads who’ve downloaded content from your website, such as a whitepaper or eBook. These follow-up emails can help nurture leads and move them closer to make an enquiry.
Email marketing allows you to build deeper relationships with your audience and keep them engaged with your firm over time.
10. Set Reminders to Measure, Analyse and Adjust
The success of your new year content marketing strategy requires measurement. You should set out within your strategy how often you’re going to analyse it, and ensure this is diarised. Regularly evaluating the performance of your content will help you identify what’s working, what needs improvement, and where to adjust your strategy.
How to Measure Content Marketing Success
- Track performance metrics: Use tools like Google Analytics to track key metrics such as website traffic, bounce rates, and conversion rates. These insights will help you determine which content is driving the most engagement and leads.
- Monitor lead generation: Measure how many leads your content is generating and track how those leads are converting into clients. Pay attention to the types of content that lead to the most enquiries.
- Refine your strategy: Use your performance data to refine your content marketing strategy. For example, if a particular topic or format is performing well, consider creating more content around that theme. If certain content is underperforming, analyse why and adjust accordingly.
By regularly measuring and analysing your content marketing efforts, you’ll be able to continuously improve your strategy and achieve better results over time.
Start Your New Year Content Marketing Off The Right Way
As legal and professional services firms look ahead to the new year, building a strong content marketing strategy is essential for staying competitive and driving business growth. By incorporating these 10 key elements into your new year content marketing strategy, you can create content that resonates with your target audience, builds trust, and positions your firm as a thought leader in your industry. A well-rounded strategy will ensure your firm stands out in a crowded market and continues to grow in the year ahead.
Let’s Talk About Your New Year Content Marketing Strategy
Building a content strategy for the new year is essential to ensure your content is focused and delivers the results you need. Our award-winning team, with over 40 years’ experience, knows what it takes to build content strategies that work.
Want to talk to us about building your new year content strategy? Get in touch today for a free consultation, and let’s make your firm the go-to expert in your field.
All content in this article was correct at the time of publication.
