Creating and distributing content is an important part of any marketing plan. Follow these five steps to get started.

Step one, make a plan.

Planning your content is more efficient and maximizes the impact of your content. It will save you time and allows you to coordinate your content with other marketing and business development initiatives.

When planning for each piece of content, you will want to consider your medium, target audience, and purpose in writing because this will impact the type of content you produce, the tone of the content, and the length of your piece.

For example, a tweet is limited to 280 characters. The maximum length of a LinkedIn post is around 3,000 characters, and a blog post could theoretically be unlimited. Therefore, knowing which medium you are creating content for will dictate how much space you have to share your message.

Step two, create your content.

When creating content, consider your purpose in writing. Most lawyers write for the following reasons: to retain existing clients by providing useful information, to attract new clients by increasing their visibility and demonstrating their knowledge of a topic, to increase their stature in a practice area, or to grow their online presence by increasing organic search traffic.

Creating well-thought-out and valuable content tailored to what your target audience is looking for will achieve these goals. It should answer their questions and inform them about relevant issues. As a starting point, consider what questions your clients and potential clients are regularly asking. The “People Also Ask” section of Google is another good place to start. What are people looking at or reacting to in the content you are already posting and distributing? Another option is noteworthy events, such as current events, high-profile cases, and legislative changes that may impact your clients.

Step three, be a thought leader.

Becoming recognized as an authority in your area of practice can increase your visibility and your attractiveness to new clients. There are no rules to becoming a thought leader but becoming a thought leader takes time. To become a thought leader, you must create consistent content, be passionate about what you do, share content that is relevant, trustworthy, and garners attention, and you need to make sure that you are engaging regularly with your audience.

Many attorneys choose to raise their profile by participating on social media, such as LinkedIn and Twitter, by creating and sharing content for content aggregators, such as JD Supra, by seeking out speaking engagements and webinars, or by being part of a podcast, such as as a guest or as a host.

Step four, distribute your content.

You’ve spent a lot of time making a plan, creating content, and establishing yourself as a thought leader. Now, you want to maximize its effective reach. It’s not enough to just write a blog post for your website or share an article on LinkedIn, and then sit back and wait for the phone calls to come in.

The next step is sharing your content on platforms appropriate to the type of content you produced for your target audience. For some attorneys, this may be TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, or LinkedIn. For others, it’s posting to the firm’s website or to legal content aggregators. Others still may choose to share their content via email or old-fashioned snail mail.

Many attorneys will choose to distribute their content on multiple platforms, depending on the target audience and the purpose in creating the content.

Step five, reuse your content in new ways.

It takes a lot of effort and non-billable time to produce content. We wanna make sure you get the most out of it. One piece of content can be shared and repurposed to reach different audiences in different ways. Remember to produce your content in multiple formats to make sure that you reach clients and potential clients in the way they interact with content in their daily lives.

Blogs, videos, podcasts, frequently asked questions, infographics, and even hard copy marketing materials are all options. For example, a lengthy blog post could also be the basis of an abbreviated post on LinkedIn, and an infographic on Twitter. A presentation that you gave could be chopped up into short videos to share on LinkedIn or on your website. You can also share your content with current clients or prospects in a client email blast or a firm newsletter.

By following these steps, you’ll ensure the time you invest in creating your content pays off.