Content is often the bedrock of a modern digital marketing strategy. On this episode of Three Things, LISI’s Director of Client Success + Marketing, Taryn Elliott, will share three things you can do right now to produce more effective marketing content for your organization.

Hi everyone. I’m Taryn Elliott, the director of client success and marketing at LISI and I am your host for this installment of Three Things. Today, we are talking three things about content. Content is a valuable marketing tool. No matter what, you can undertake content marketing strategy, whether you are in person, whether you are remote, whether you have a snowstorm that shuts down your entire city or even the entire east coast. We at LISI are big fans of content and content marketing and we are actually doubling down on that in 2022. We’re streamlining our production processes and we are investing in new platforms to create new and different content and get it out to our audience in new, and different ways. Because of that, we thought content made sense for us to tackle in our February Three Things livestream and so here we go.

Before we dive into the three things that we’re gonna cover, I wanted to go over something that is overarching no matter the type of content you’re creating. Whatever you’re doing, the content you produce and share should be educational, meaning it should be helping your audience to do their job. It should be relevant, meaning it’s having some kind of impact on their business. It should be timely. It’s important right now. It wasn’t important six months ago, but important right now, and it should be novel, meaning that it hasn’t been widely shared by too many other sources currently. And lastly, it should be informative. It should be teaching your audience about you and what you do and what your product is.

So let’s dive into the three things that we are gonna cover today. We are gonna cover the bedrock of content blog and written content. We’re gonna go into video content after that. And then finally, we are going to cover all of the things above and beyond video and written content for our third item.

Bedrock of Content Blog and Written Content

So the bedrock blogs and written content, I debated including that in this livestream of three things, because it seemed really basic. It seemed like something, you know, everybody knows about, it’s just blogs, but when I was writing the description for this livestream, I said that content was the bedrock of, and I quote “a modern digital marketing strategy.” So I felt I would be remiss if I didn’t include blogs and written content in my presentation today. Often when we think about content, the first place our mind goes is blogs and written content. So let’s start there. Blogs are a great place to start. If you like writing, go for it. You don’t even need a computer. You can do blogs and written content with paper and a pen to get started. I’ve even seen people use a napkin and a lip liner to get a blog started when they’ve been out and had a great idea. A lot of people know they should be creating blogs and written content, but they’re not really sure where to start and that’s kind of, what’s holding them up.

So if you’re looking for content ideas for writing, a couple of places to start are your Google analytics or wherever you get your analytics. LinkedIn would be a really good place too. But dig into those analytics and see what pages people are visiting on your website, what posts people are commenting on your most or what posts people are commenting on, and your most popular blog posts on your website. Also, when you’re digging into your analytics, look at your search terms that people use on the website, what is it that people want to know? What is it that people are looking for? And when you’re then creating content from the search terms, people are using make sure that you are using those search terms in your rating. Make sure that you’re thinking like your consumer or your perspective reader is thinking not what maybe the legal speak, the legal jargon is.

You know, people aren’t typing legal jargon into Google, they’re typing, you know, thought consciousness, whatever is coming to their mind that’s what’s going into the search. Next, what questions are you asking most often? When you are communicating with your clients, maybe an email or on the phone, what are they asking you? When you are at a networking event what do people wanna know? When you’re talking to a prospect what are the questions that they are asking? If one person’s asking it, there are probably a lot more people who are wondering about it. Plus this is kind of an informal way to gauge trends and to figure out what’s going on in your area of practice right now — what people are confused about. Those are all great topics to write on.

Next, you can consider your existing content. A lot of times there’s already blogs that have been produced, that you might be able to pull out and just update it — just make some tweaks. That’s called evergreen content. And if you just make the tweaks, you can post it, move it to the top of your blog queue, and people can read it again and take that information in again. If you wrote it six weeks, six months, six years ago, people have probably forgotten about it and can use a refresher. And if you are doing this, make sure you also are putting it out on your social media. You know, specifically, you’re LinkedIn, in an email, you know, even be an informal email to some of your clients like, “Hey, I came across this blog post. We were talking about this the other day. I thought this might be useful for you.” Finally, you can expand even further on the existing content you have. Look at the blog posts you have and see if there are areas where you could dive even deeper.

Maybe you wrote a post that says something like “Five Things to Consider If…” and each of those five things got a paragraph. But what if each of those five things warranted an entire blog post? Or what if you had a blog post and it included a checklist at the bottom, maybe you could write an entire post about the checklist and expand upon what you need to do. What I really love about diving deeper into content like this is that the search engines are always looking for an authority on a topic. And when you take a single piece of content and link it to all of the other pieces of content related to it, you’re telling the search engine, I am that authority, and when people are Googling this or searching for this, you should bring me up in your results. That’s called a content pillar, and it’s a great strategy. But remember, if you are creating one post in several posts related to it they all need to link to each other. Once you have that person reading your posts, you want them to stay there. You wanna make it easy for them to keep reading more posts.

Video

The second thing we’re gonna cover today is video content. According to Cisco this year, 82% of all online traffic will be attributed to video and landing pages with videos are 53 times more likely to show up on the first page of search engine results. So it’s probably not surprising that 93% of marketers across all industries report that video is going to be a core part of their content strategy. That was enough to just to persuade us at LISI that video needed to be a core part of our 2022 content strategy, and I hope it’s enough to persuade you that as well. Video content isn’t new, but it’s really an untapped market.

There are so many different things that you can produce, and there are so many different ways to do it. So video is great for a lot of reasons, and it really, really, really should be a focus of your content strategy. Some people love being on video and some people are great on it, but before we really dive into a few more things on video, I wanted to say that video isn’t always about being on camera and speaking for, you know, 25 solid minutes on a topic that’s not what video has to be at all. For some people, you don’t even have to be on video. You can use graphics and PowerPoints and stock photos and maybe even stock videos. And just your content, your words to create a video that still conveys your message and conveys that you’re an expert on the topic you wanna speak, or you can do something like this livestream, where you have just a little bit of you and then a bigger section for content or for data that you want to share.

So I wanted to throw that out there because I don’t want people to be like, oh, video. I don’t wanna be on camera and ignore it. There are other ways to approach it, but one of the advantages to video, and one of the reasons we love it is that people get a chance to know you. A lot of times we’re asking people to make buying decisions for legal services, which is almost always a big, important decision, especially for consumers, and they don’t have a lot of time to get to know you to build that trust with you. And video can be a way that they can start to do that. Video is a way to personalize your content, and we’ve been seeing over the last year or so that content that is personal about attorneys, about financial advisors, about consultants, whatever the industry, is performing better than just content alone.

I think there’s a huge opportunity for law firms to incorporate video on their website site, specifically on their attorney bio pages, and I see two easy ways to incorporate video on a bio page. The first is to create an attorney, bio video, a video where you get to know about the attorney. You get to know what their background is, what they did, what their practices are, and some of their knowledge about that. Plus also get to know them personally, like I said, to start building that trust, to start building that rapport with clients and prospects. Another way is to do educational videos, kind of like a blog post in video form, and put that on your bio. You already have the written bio there. People can read your credentials. They can say, oh, you know what, he’s everything or she, that I’m looking for on paper.

And then they can see a video of you talking about the practice area that you practice and your knowledge, and really start establishing yourself as a subject matter expert, as a thought leader in that area, and pulling that all together. Really give people the confidence that they’re making the right decision. If you’re not really sure where to start with video, there’s a lot of different options for recording video. One way to do video is to approach it as short, short-form video content, which means you may be to like a topic and you write a few videos. One to three minutes, doesn’t have to be long, do a series and release them occasionally, maybe that’s on social media. Maybe that’s through email, maybe that’s on your website. That’s all new content. But another way is to look at existing content. And you’re gonna see me come back to the subject over and over again.

And, but look at your blog post. You’ve already written that you’ve already gathered all of the information there, and maybe there’s a way to take some of that out into a video. It doesn’t even have to be the whole blog post. Maybe it’s a section. You can share that, however, you disseminate your information, but then you can also go back and put that video in a blog post to make that a richer, more valuable piece of content. And also don’t just think of video as how you can use it on your website. Again, think of how you can use it on social media, on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on Facebook, whatever social media platform makes sense for you, how you can use it on your website and not just on attorney bios, but maybe in blogs and resources, in information about your practice areas on your homepage.

Video can also be livestreams like this. It can be presentations, it can be seminars. It can be a video of a PowerPoint from a presentation you give, like, think of what you have, think of how you can cut it up, and how you can release it. Be more efficient when creating content. Finally, a note on videos, not everyone is consuming video with the audio on. So make sure that you have captions and subtitles.

Everthing Else

And finally, the third thing we’re gonna cover today is everything else. A lot of people think content, they think video, they think writing that’s all well and good, but maybe you wanna go beyond that. Maybe you’ve already started doing that. You wanna introduce some new things. Other options are white papers and guides. This is a deeper dive into the things you may have already covered. It’s more time-consuming to produce, but often you can use this to get other information that’s valuable.

So generally a law firm or an organization will create a form that you need to fill out, asking for a name, a phone number, an email address, a job title, whatever information is valuable to the organization to then use moving forward. In other marketing efforts, creating an in-depth white paper or guide also is able to start building trust. Start establishing yourself again as a subject matter expert, and also kind of creates goodwill with people. When they say things like, oh, like they gave me this, they started helping me. That’s a good thing. Next is infographics. And these are another piece of content that is really, really flexible, but also you can pull it from content you already have find a blog post, find that little checklist, move it into an infographic. And for a lot of people, they’re like, oh, but I don’t have any design skills.

It doesn’t matter. All you need is a free tool like Canva. They have templates putting your brand colors, put your content in there, download it. And you have an image that’s ready to go. You can share it on social media. You can send it in an email. You can put it back in that blog post again, to create a richer form of content for people consuming that information. If you really love writing, and you have a lot to say on your specific topic, books and eBooks are an option. These are gonna be really time-consuming. Although I do know that there are resources you can hire to assist with this, what better marketing than to say, oh, well, I literally wrote the book on that topic. There are livestreams, which is what this is. And there is a lot of forms for livestreams, such as educational live streams, panels, interviews.

And one of our favorite forms of livestreams is the Q&A or the Ask Me Anything session because the benefit with livestreams is that people can comment and you can interact with your audience in real-time. As you are conducting the livestream. Finally, podcasts. Podcasts have exploded in popularity in the last couple years. And LISI has finally jumped on the bandwagon. I’m so excited and we released our first podcast last month. We will be doing that regularly and like livestreams there’s a lot of flexibility. There’s a lot of formats like interviews, panels, that kind of thing. What we really like for law firms is for someone to take the subject or the practice area that they know best and to really lean into that. This is somewhere where you can say, what do I do better than everyone else?

And then talk about that. You can talk about changes in the law. You can talk about updates. You can talk about areas where people are confused. You can bring in outside experts, just produce the content, release it regularly. And voila, you have a podcast you don’t even need to be on video. This one is all audio. Those are my three things for content production, but I’m going to throw in a fourth thing, a bonus, just do it, just put yourself out there. I know it can be scary, but practice makes perfect and you know what? We’re not even looking for. Perfect. We just aren’t good. So just jump in with both feet. It might feel a little scary, but the more you do be better, you will feel about it.

That is today’s LISI’s Three Things installment, please, follow us on LinkedIn to find out when we will be coming out with our next installments. When our podcasts are launching and a lot of other information and content that we are putting out there. Thanks so much for joining us and have a great weekend and stay safe and stay warm.