Five years ago, a family law firm posted a blog on its website titled “The Five Things You Must Know During a Divorce.” Since then, the partner who authored the post has left the firm and the state’s law on spousal support calculations, referenced in the post, has changed. However, the post is popular, having generated thousands of views, and is responsible for creating dozens of divorce leads.
This is just one example of legal marketing content that is prime for updating, repurposing, and resharing.
There are many reasons to consider updating, repurposing, and resharing legal marketing content. Anything from blogs, articles, and case studies to videos, presentations, and graphics can be recycled to support a law firm’s content marketing strategy. Revisiting existing legal marketing content has many benefits, including:
- Getting more bang for the buck since resources were already expended to create the original quality content. Updating, repurposing, and resharing that content increases its ROI.
- Ensuring backlinks work, incorporating high-performing keywords, and repromotion helps search engine optimization, or SEO.
- Reach new audiences, or re-target existing, interested audiences.
Updating Existing Legal Marketing Content
Using “The Five Things You Must Know During a Divorce” post scenario above, here are the best options to update content like this:
Create a new blog post by reworking the existing one so it’s not a carbon copy but has the same general information. This can be as simple as reorganizing the order of the information or finding a new way to begin the post — such as a real client anecdote that illustrates the issues. The new blog should also include any developments, like new or updated relevant laws and links. After the new blog is posted, return to the older version and add a note with a link to the new blog that says: “Please see our post ‘title’ for updates on this topic.”
This approach allows the successful URL to remain but also directs readers to better, more recent content. Remove any broken links in the original post.
Update the existing blog by rewriting the outdated parts and replacing links. Add a note that says: “This blog was updated on ‘date’ to include relevant developments.”
This approach also allows the successful URL to remain while ensuring the content is still high quality, useful, and SEO-optimized.
Best Practices for Updating Legal Marketing Content
- All posts should have published dates. Dates give readers important context and help marketing staff stay organized and find opportunities to update content.
- Content should be reviewed on a regular schedule. Set a reminder for every quarter, every six months, or once a year, depending on how much content is being published.
- Consider using Google or a paid platform to crawl the firm’s website to identify and flag broken links, since they negatively impact both SEO and the audience’s experience.
- Avoid rewriting history by using notes to readers in updates.
- Archive and redirect old (more than several years) and outdated content annually. Evergreen content — especially top-performing content — that is still relevant can remain live.
- Don’t repost word-for-word, as Google downgrades duplicate content in its search results.
Repurposing Legal Marketing Content
Repurposing legal marketing content is taking your own existing content and finding new ways to package it. Doing so gives the content new life and opens up the information to a wider audience who may prefer, say, videos over blogs. Repurposing legal marketing content makes the investment in the development of the original content more valuable.
As you go through your repurposing process, make sure to pay attention to the latest Google algorithm core updates as these will affect your website ranking. Repurposed content should have vital keywords that your clients are searching for at the moment, along with following best practices for search engine optimization.
Here are just some of the ways to repurpose legal marketing content:
- Webinar 🡪 Blog — Hours of time went into researching a webinar topic and putting the presentation together. Use the webinar recording and/or transcripts and the slide deck to write a blog, or multiple blogs on different topics.
- Webinar 🡪 Article — Consider doing the above but for a publication that reaches your target audience. For example, a webinar on an update to the bankruptcy code could be an article of interest to the local chambers of commerce magazine.
- Blog 🡪 Video — Anything that is written can also be captured in a video. Creating introductory videos to a blog that quickly, in 30 seconds or less, summarize the blog’s highlights is a way to repurpose the blog and promote it.
- Blog 🡪 Infographic — A blog, or any content, that includes quantifiable data could be ripe for repurposing into an infographic. Infographics, which give information visually with graphs, charts, and icons, are growing in popularity as an easily digestible way to receive data. An estate planning attorney could turn a blog about the four most important documents to include in an estate plan into an infographic checklist, for example.
- Case Study 🡪 Pitch —The firm recently had a great outcome for a criminal law client by utilizing a little-known loophole in the state’s sentencing law. That’s a great case study for the firm's website but it may also be of interest to a reporter and his or her readers. Repurpose the case study as a media pitch and invite a reporter to interview you.
The combination possibilities are endless. The above list doesn’t mention many other repurposing approaches, like converting presentations into SlideShares, compiling blog posts on the same topic into an eBook, creating podcasts, snipping longer videos into shorter clips for social media, etc. The key is to look at the existing quality and valuable content and find more ways to squeeze it for all its worth.
Best Practices for Repurposing Legal Marketing Content
- Whenever possible, link the original and repurposed content to each other. Maybe someone isn’t interested in watching a webinar but would be happy to read a 500-word blog on the topic.
- Get in the habit of thinking about how content can be repurposed while it’s being created.
- Use analytics and metrics to identify popular content and repurpose those.
Resharing Legal Marketing Content
Share and promote the updated and repurposed content everywhere the original content was shared: social media, newsletters, internally, via email to clients, etc.
Resharing is also a good practice for evergreen content that isn’t in need of updating or repurposing. Add evergreen content to content and/or social media calendars to ensure it is reshared regularly.
Updating, repurposing, and resharing existing legal marketing content should not take the place of creating new content. But with so many benefits, it makes sense to be a content conservationist.
If you're ready to take your content to the next level, reach out to Scorpion and get help with all your legal marketing needs.
