A Whole Lot of Content Content

Screen Shot 2015-03-09 at 11.34.02 AMBy now, you’ve heard about the value of content marketing – either from Seth Godin, who says it’s the only marketing left or a cheesy marketing company, hawking ass-kicking copy for your law firm website or blog.  Whether knowingly or not, lawyers have instinctively always engaged in content marketing: in the olden days, by writing columns for the local newspaper, publishing law review articles, penning a column for bar publications or authoring a book. Today’s lawyers have more options – electronic newsletters, blogging, e-books, case studies and info graphics as well as other media like video or podcasts. In fact, with access to a computer and without the pesky quality control of publishers or editors, today’s consumers suffer from content overload.

Still, for lawyers, content remains valuable. Not to market or brand a practice or for SEO, but to educate the public and potential clients.  Still, with so much stuff floating around, it’s hard to get noticed. Plus, with so many corporate brands engaging in content marketing, a plain vanilla e-book in PDF format or an amateurish video may no longer impress – the adage don’t judge a book by its cover doesn’t necessarily translate to the Internet.  

So if you’re looking for ideas on how you might spiff up your content, you should check out this Content Marketing Round Up at TopRank Blog , which aggregates eleven gorgeous e-books on content marketing (though note, if you go crazy downloading them all, you’ll wind up with an email box full of spam – since permission marketing is content marketing’s inseparable Siamese twin.) One of my favorites was the Marketo Guide to Engaging Content Marketing  because I didn’t have to register to access it, plus it had the most words on a page (one of today’s annoying content marketing trends seems to involve putting 5 tiny words of text on a page, presumably to up the page count). In particular, I also liked Marketo’s “cheat sheet” as a type of content because it’s short, snappy and if useful, it’s the kind of thing that users will consult for a long time. Which is exactly the way content marketing should work.

Do you use content marketing in your practice? What kind of results have you experienced? Please share in the comments below.

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