Our law firm content marketing section will give you lots of advice and ideas on how you can create a constant stream of material so you’re never short of an interesting article or social media post to promote your firm.
We’ll show you how the same material can be used across all these platforms, and once written, it can be used over and over again with minimal effort. This week we focus on how you can create great articles by identifying trends in your own practice area.
We’ll show you how you can do this yourself in our main articles but here’s a few tasters to get you started.
Commenting on stories in the press that relate to your field
You can often get your name mentioned in your local paper just by commenting on developments in your field.
Lots of law firms got valuable publicity out of the introduction of the new ‘no blame’ divorce law. Some firms wrote articles for papers and their websites outlining the changes and the effect they would have. Others, however, simply provided comments to be added into a newspaper’s own article. This is a good example from the Nottingham Evening Post.
We just show the headline and first line of the story but won’t republish it all here for copyright reasons. If you click on the headline, it will take you to the full article.
From Wednesday, couples will be able to separate without apportioning blame as no-fault divorce legislation comes into force.
The paper writes a summary of the changes and Kate Daly from the online divorce service Amicable adds some comments, saying among other things that the change signals a “huge narrative shift to separation” and will go some way to healing the “blame-laden” system.
Elspeth Kinder, partner and head of family law at JMW Solicitors also comments. In both cases, the solicitors quoted are able to present themselves as leaders in their field, an impression reinforced by the fact that the newspaper has trusted them to appear as expert commentators.
Identify trends in your field of practice
Law firms can get valuable publicity in the press and create original blog posts for social media by identifying trends in their specialist fields.
These might be themes that emerge because of new fashions, lifestyles or technological developments. They might be the kind subjects that aren’t covered by legislation at the moment but may have to be in future.
It’s best explained by giving some examples. Here’s a story that was published in the Manchester Evening News, based on a press release from the law firm Simpson Millar.
Law firm sees huge rise in immigration enquiries after Brexit
National law firm Simpson Millar’s head of immigration Emma Brooksbank has reported a huge rise in calls from EU migrants hoping to secure permanent residence.
Click through how to see Simpson Millar were able to promote their services for free by placing an article in the Manchester Evening News.
This technique can be adapted to whatever area of law you practise. Maybe more people are failing to make wills, maybe more people are affected by some industrial illness or injury. Or maybe there’s an increase in victimisation at work.
Several law firms recently got publicity in national and local media by pointing out there had been a surge in employment cases following the government’s decision to abolish tribunal fees after the Supreme Court ruled them to illegal.
In this example, Withy King get coverage from the BBC by highlighting a Bitcoin trend
Divorcing couples may clash over Bitcoin
Divorcing couples are being warned to disclose all their assets amid fears that some may use digital currencies such as Bitcoin to hide their wealth.
Lawyers suggest that the anonymous nature of these digital currencies could prove tempting to those involved in an acrimonious split.
As with Simpson Millar, Royds Withy King get priceless publicity on the BBC just for identifying an interesting new trend.
If you can’t think of any trends in your area of law at the moment, you could always try commenting on topical stories in the media, or even find ideas in television programmes.
Do you like watching Dragon’s Den on TV? Maybe that could give you some ideas, especially if you specialise in commercial law. For example, the dragons often give budding entrepreneurs a hard time about not patenting their ideas properly. This could easily lead to an article about the perils of copyright piracy and what firms should to do to protect their intellectual property.
This page is regularly updated with new ideas for articles and examples of how law firms just like yours are marketing their services through the mainstream media and their own online platforms.
Take a look through the articles in this law firm marketing section to see in more detail how you can promote your firm and its services.