While creativity is certainly required to execute a successful law firm marketing campaign, the starting point for law firm marketers should always be data. Data tells you what in your current content creation process is working, what isn’t, and where you can go next in order to advance your digital marketing strategy. Utilizing data hones and focuses your strategy, ensuring that your content is hitting the mark every time and increasing your law firm’s return on its investment in search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing. Let’s take a closer look at where and how data analysis can aid in law firm content creation.

Using Data to Set Your Goals

Before you begin your marketing journey, it’s vital to know where you want to go. Different marketing plans and types of content aim to accomplish different goals. Are you hoping to increase your potential client pool? Are you looking to establish your law firm as a thought leader in the field? Are you trying to generate leads at a faster rate? Each of these questions will lead to varied takes on content creation, with specifically-chosen topics and keywords. Looking at historical data from your past campaigns, you can assess the results that your individual marketing campaigns have yielded. These results can range from which blog topics were most popular to which social media posts had the highest impact on lead generation. Be sure to pay close attention to your key performance indicators (KPIs) to see how different content has performed. Knowing what has and has not worked in the past will give you insight into which tactics will be most effective to reach your goals.

Find Your Target Audience and Topics

When you’re making the effort to produce excellent content, you want to make sure it’s seen by the right audience. When your content is put in front of the right eyes, you’re more likely to generate leads that will turn into paying clients. Analyze the data related to both your standard client and to who’s seeing the content you’re putting out. What’s the age range of your standard client? What are their pain points? Where on the internet do they generally “live”? Identifying these factors will help your content hit the mark every time.

Similarly, knowing your audience and understanding past performance will help you choose topics for your content that are most likely to generate leads that will convert to paying clients. Analyzing historical data can show you what topics speak most to your potential clients and their needs. Learning about your niche and even examining what your competitors are doing can steer you in the right direction.

Data Creates Your Content’s Framework

Data can provide you with the structure for your content. One of the major ways that it can do this is through keyword research and analytics. Keyword data gives you an understanding of the language that your potential client base uses. This allows your content to appeal both to the search engines and to human users – if you tailor your content to use terms that are genuinely being used in search, the search engines reward that and your content begins to organically appear in front of the right people. Utilize data from Google Analytics, SEMrush, and other sources for keyword information to create a strong framework for your piece of content.

Understand Your Channels

Once your content is created with researched topics and relevant keywords, it’s time to market your finished product. A key part of this step of the process is understanding the data explaining where your target audience spends its time online. Does your potential client pool reside on Twitter, or is your content more likely to reach them through LinkedIn? What about your Google Business Profile, or your company’s own personal blog? Consider, too, whether the content you’ve written would make good guest content on a relevant, third-party website that could send new traffic your way. Posting on a reputable website that’s not your own increases your authority in the eyes of the search engines, increasing the possibility that the content will be displayed to more people on the search engine results pages. Analyze the historical data for your content – where has it been most successful? Have certain topics performed better as guest blogs than as content on your law firm’s own website? At every step of the content development process, consider where and how you want your content to be marketed, and bear it in mind until you’re ready to publish.

Measure Your Results

Just as you analyzed your KPIs at the outset of the content creation process, so too will you use them to measure your results once your content is live. Over time, gauge the results against your original goals and see how your new content measures up. Look at metrics like clicks, impressions, and conversions. Did you try to utilize an unexpected channel of distribution? Was this topic a departure for your law firm, or was it a tried and tested subject? If your content was centered around a common subject for your practice area, how did its performance compare to past pieces? Using the knowledge gleaned from your data, you can make adjustments moving forward.

Don’t let data analysis be a one-time part of your marketing strategy – be sure to continually reference how your content is performing, and make changes as needed to ensure that your content is doing its part to enhance your law firm’s visibility and lead generation efforts.