As the buyer journey is a little different for the professional services than it is for more traditional B2B suppliers, lawyers and accountants need to be smart if they’re going to drive their content marketing strategy.
With more brand led products the aim is to produce viral content based on what they’re selling. Blogs and infographics can be supported by buyer guides, product demos and user reviews.
However, for the professional services the aim is to establish yourself as experienced specialists in the areas you are targeting. This requires the support of white papers, industry reports, webinars, case studies and testimonials; content that will actively inform and educate your readers.
Every piece also has to lead your readers back to your website.
But persuading your readers to take action involves developing content that will not only catch your audience’s attention but also resonate with them. To do that it needs to talk to them directly and you can only do that if you know exactly who you’re writing for.
Create Buyer Personas
The first step towards understanding your readers is developing a buyer – or, more accurately, a client – persona.
A buyer persona is simply a cameo of your ideal client. It is all data you’ll have around the firm, whether that’s in your case management system, your fee earner’s heads or, most likely, a little of both.
For services aimed at individuals this will include their age, sex, demographic, post code, income, and asset base. It’ll also take in their likely interests and issues.
For services aimed at business it will include their sector, location, modus operandi, objectives, turnover, stage and again their interest and issues.
However, it’s essential all your content reaches all your potential clients for all your practice areas. This means you’ll need to develop multiple buyer personas.
Conduct Keyword Research
Once you have your buyer personas you can choose your topics. In order to choose the right topics you could start by asking yourself the following questions:
What are your buyer personas’ ‘pain points’?
How do they search for possible solutions to these ‘pain points’?
How does your firm deliver these solutions?
What are the keywords driving traffic to similar solutions?
This is where keyword research will pay dividends. Once you’ve added the relevant keywords, your content will work harder for the search engines and the higher you rank, the more traffic you’ll generate. The higher the traffic, the more likely you’ll be to achieve your ultimate objective – enquiries.
Create topic clusters
Topic clusters is just a marketing term for groups of related content stored and promoted form a specific page on your website.
Not only does this concentrate your keywords in one place, it also allows you to initiate scalable content you can consistently build upon over time.
There are two ways of doing this.
The first is what we call reskinning. If, for example, you write a blog, you can revisit it and repackage it as a video, a podcast or a checklist. You can collate a number of blog posts and republish it as a newsletter or build on the detail to produce a white paper.
The second is updating. You can revisit an old blog and bring it up to date either by mentioning a recent legislative change or adding more up to date point of reference from the news or popular culture.
Updating is very important from an SEO point of view. As both the legislative changes and new stories or TV shows will be in the public eye, people will be searching on them. If your content can be aligned to the key words in these searches they rank better, create more views and more enquiries.
If you are finding it tough to create a steady flow of new content, why not outsource it to us? Or if you’d like us to run our session on producing content that does BD so your lawyers and accountants can drive your content marketing strategy, email us today and we’ll give you a sneak peak into what we cover.