content strategy

3 reasons why web content can elevate your business game

Manuel Pueyo · Apr 14, 2022 ·

The job of regularly updating your website with news, thoughts and useful information is a time consuming craft that requires a good deal of thinking. But it can bring great advantages that are worth considering.

Showcasing your expertise

If you work in a sector that is knowledge intensive, your team has knowhow and information that is certainly valuable to someone out there.

Web content is about giving extra use to that knowledge. You can publish part of it in a web page so that it can be found by people that might need it.

You are openly showing to the world that you know what you are talking about (your field of expertise) and that you are willing to share that knowledge as part of your service.

One of the dangers of being an expert is that, sometimes, you ignore that you know too much about a topic. This is why we believe effective content is a partnership between subject matter experts and content publishing experts. They will make sure that the content you write is accessible for people and algorithms.

Using content to learn & explore new territories 📍

In the current volatile and changing world, the capacity to learn new things is essential to stay afloat in business.

For example, let’s imagine you are a real estate lawyer and you would like to explore how upcoming technologies (Virtual Reality or Blockchain) are going to change the real estate regulatory environment. You know nothing about those topics but web writing as a process can help you critically explore them. Writing as a process makes you ask the right questions and maybe find some answers.

Writing is also a great excuse to get in touch with other subject matter experts in the field you would like to learn about. I find writing a blog post, is often a good argument to start a conversation with an expert I don’t personally know. Maybe asking him a question, a written contribution or a quote.

Leading with content

Many business and other institutional actors have lost touch with their customers. People are lost and they need leaders they can trust.

This is your opportunity to shine and be different from your competitors. You know what the problems of your clients are and web content can be a great tool to reconnect with them.

In order to reinforce that trust, show more of your real opinions in an authentic way. A content strategy can be a great process to listen to people around you, rethink your core values and show what you think is fair, what is pertinent to do right now.

When you start creating content that is aligned with your core values, you are going to start to attract the people that connect with those values at the emotional level. Your ideal clients and collaborators start to pop up🍄. Your can use that momentum to hire new people, invite them to your events and start building community with them.

Don’t know where to start? Seize the opportunity 🙋‍♀️

I hope I gave you some solid arguments to decide to invest in web content. It can become a business asset to make you gain competitive advantage and elevate your business game.

We love helping teams at the initial phase of a content strategy.

Apply for a discovery session. Let’s have a conversation on how you can start tapping into the business value of web content.

Let’s get SEOrious : why law firms should consider SEO to grow their client portfolio and build a better legal Internet

Manuel Pueyo · Oct 25, 2021 ·

I want to convince you that if you are a law firm with at least 10 lawyers in your team, you need to be doing SEO right now💎.

I’m not going to give you a definition of SEO because there are many out there ( you should check SEO gurus like ahrefs, yoast, moz, screaming frog) .

For me, doing SEO is like dancing with Google🕺🏼: You are creating content and helping Google achieve it’s mission. If you do that, Google is going to treat you well and give you rewards🎁.

What is Google’s mission? At it’s core, they have to understand language. Their job is to figure out what people are searching for and surface helpful information from the web, no matter how they spell or combine the words in their query.

The E in SEO stands for Experience

Originally SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. For me doing SEO is less about search “Engine” and more about search “Experience”. That places the focus less on pleasing the machine and more on pleasing the human who is searching for information. The closest your piece of content is to you user’s human needs and their context, the higher your chances are of getting good results.

Doing SEO is using “digital” to accomplish part of your mission as a lawyer

According to the UN basic principles on the role of lawyers, one of their key roles is advising clients as to their legal rights and obligations, and as to the working of the legal system. Yes! One big part of the mission of the lawyer is to clarify information, to give information.. and now guess where are people looking for information today🤔? It’s Bing, DuckDuck, Yandex, and of course the big Google.

I was yesterday talking to an “artist” friend of mine who did not know if she had to declare their income coming from an airbnb listing to the tax authorities in Belgium. She clearly had a legal question but she was lost and did not know who she was supposed to ask. I said, why don’t you “Google it”? She said she did, but she got different pages saying different things about it. No page in the search results was tailored enough with an answer adapted to her life situation. This could be a content creation opportunity for law firms.

Let’s face it. It’s year 2021, if not you, somebody else is going to be doing it, somebody else is going to try to disrupt your market. The risk of not doing this as a lawyer is that there is an increasing number of actors with commercial interests (startups) that are not registered in a Bar, they don’t have same ethical standards as lawyers do, and they are writing content on the web solving legal issues. I know from direct sources that Bar registered lawyers are very worried about their market being disrupted by actors outside the Bar. I would advice them to stop worrying and start using digital to accomplish their mission as a lawyer.

Doing SEO as a lawyer who writes for the web

Web is a different medium. When you write your texts for the web you need to plan them, write them and display them in a different way.

Doing SEO is breaking up long texts and writing only what your user needs. Think about “micro questions” or “micro moments”, somebody out there has a burning legal question:

Is it legal to make vaccines a workplace obligation?

Think about my friend Ana who is an unemployed artist and does not know if she has to pay taxes for her Airbnb listing.

I know this is difficult because you have been trained to write differently but try to write a post that answers only that. And remove superfluous words or ideas that do not serve that purpose.

I am going to show you a bad example, but not to blame the author. On the contrary, I recognize the great work this law firm is doing with their content:

I think this article in french is a bad example for SEO, what they say is comprehensive and probably right in their analysis, but looks more like a report or memo: there are too many questions answered in this post. basically you need to break this article in 5 or 6 mini articles that answer smaller questions.

Doing SEO strengthen some good muscles💪

User centric muscles

It forces you to question if your service is good and to change adapt it to what your users need at each moment. More on this in this article

Mind clarity & information organization muscles

SEO forces you to think about having a clear mission for your website’s content and, as a side effect, also your law firm mission.

But you also need to have a structured website, with good schema markup language that makes sense to robots who are trying to understand what your website is about.

Collaboration muscles

Another good “thing” coming from SEO is that is will improve your collaboration skills. You need to go out there and connect with other legal actors that have websites in your semantic area. You need to find ways so that they link to your site. Those are “back links” and they will improve your SEO results.

I hope I managed to give you some good reasons on why should start being a much more SEOrious lawyer.

Get in touch with us if you would like to start creating SEO optimized content for your website ➡️ Sign up to our newsletter and you will get an email every month on things around the legal transformation of the legal sector.

Law firm website content: an interesting way to get closer to your ideal client

Manuel Pueyo · Aug 17, 2021 ·

Digital is not a thing. It’s a way of doing things. Websites are not goods. It’s not like a ping-pong table🏓, you pay, you put it on your office and the project is done. When you decide to get a website going you are starting a system in which you put a set of actors and tools in continuous motion. This means, there is a beginning but there is not an end to the project.

I see a lot of law firms creating beautiful websites, but poor on content . It looks like they want a vitrine, a showcase🗿 but they don’t want to embrace web technology as a storage of value and as an enabler of a good legal service. They buy websites like they buy ping-pong tables, they don’t want to get their best actors involved in content creation.

As a lawyer you need to understand that if you are not currently creating content you are missing an opportunity to get closer to your ideal clients and ensure your law firm will be relevant in the next 10 years.

What is law firm website content ?

Law firm website content is about giving your legal knowledge a new home🏠. A new place where to live, travel and connect with the outside world.

Your lawyers know about many aspects of the law, it’s application in courts and tribunals, and tips on how to apply it in real life. This knowledge should not be kept for the coffee conversations with your other lawyer colleagues.

When you write it or draw it, when you record it in audiovisual format and you upload it on the web it’s called content. And content flies.

Since this is valuable, you want to store that knowledge in a house you own, organize it under your own rules, not only in third party silos you can’t control (LinkedIn, Facebook,etc).

The web is a place you can use to, safely and securely, store this valuable knowledge. The content is a storage of your value as a lawyer.

Why is it a good moment for law firms to start creating content?

There are many reasons in August 2021 for law firms to start taking seriously content creation

Content creation strengthens your user centric muscles 🧠

At the top of the agenda of law firms today is improving their legal service. This could be done by applying legal design which is the application of service design to the legal field.

But lawyers are not designers. They have never been trained so that they have to learn it in the flow of work. Content creation can be a good start to be thinking like a designer by writing as a designer.

When you think like a designer one of your top priorities is to ensure that what you do serves a function, it solves a problem of someone out there. Good content solves a problem and fulfil the intent of what your users are seeking is the only way to go.

Google is promoting more than ever good content

Google also wants you to think like a designer. With machine learning and neuro linguistic programming (NLP), Google computers are getting really good at understanding what is the intent behind people’s searches. What is the problem they have? Finding the solution is Google’s job, and for you as content creator there is no shortcut but to deliver solutions to your clients.

Legal systems are under stronger pressure to deliver accessible text in a simple language

States are far from being able to deliver that promise of legal text that is more accessible. It’s going to be the job of the lawyer to actually make that transition from complex to simple (accessible) so that their citizens can “consume” the law. Web content is not the only, one but a good place to start that transition.

Rise of self-service models for law

By 2030 ‘everyone has a “free” lawyer at their disposal, similar to Siri’. Selfservice models will have a huge impact on the market. This is already visible today, look at the LegalZoom IPO and recent funding for RocketLawyer. By creating “structured” content placing your knowledge in accessible web format you are starting to create future proof content that can be flexible and adapted to any future apps and tools.

Good content accelerates your digital transformation

When you decide to get a website you are starting a system in which you put a set of actors and tools in continuous motion. Content needs a production rhythm. A good flow.

When you start to regularly create content for the web you need to put in place team processes: an editorial production workflow that is going to , hopefully, make your team question, in a positive way, how you are all working together. You are going to need to adopt new digital tools and practices and this challenge is going to accelerate your team digital transformation maturity.

And remember this

Awareness: more eyeballs on your law firm

Finally, it is a good moment to create content if you want your brand to be more visible. You can read this amazing story of a Scandinavian law firm that started to create content and increased the visitor of their website by 600%.

How to create content ?

Content is hard work. It’s political. It requires vision alignment with your partners. It involves decision making at different levels inside the organization. It requires an orchestration of tools, people and processes working in line as an editorial factory🏭. This is the discipline called content operations.

We suggest involving every department in the content creation process: since the best content is the one who solves a need from your client, you need to hear specially from the departments that are closer to the client what are the clients expectations and problems. But this is not something they are used to do : your lawyers don’t think in terms of content opportunities. You are going to need to change some habits.

Include different profiles, involve a coach: it often takes two people to write a good piece of content. Why is that? Because your lawyers they need practice to get to write an article that is free from jargon and written for online readers 👀💻.

Improve your human listening capabilities💙. Pains and problems are not always rational. Sometimes you need to train your lawyers to listen with the heart not only with the mind.

To summarize I repeat again the same key message:

It is surprising to see how many law firms are neglecting the opportunity to grow by creating content. Don’t miss this train! content will get closer to your ideal clients and move your law firm towards modernity.

Four qualities your lawyers must have to succeed with your legal marketing blog

Manuel Pueyo · Sep 3, 2020 ·

Good web content can make you stand out and “outsmart” your competitors. Your editorial team must have (or acquire) certain skills in order to get there

Empathy

There are thousands of websites out there. If you really want to stand out, you need smarter content. Smart content is solves an issue for the reader. Your lawyers need to be able to identify problems that your target audience has. Your lawyers need to write words that solve that problem. We call this empathy and we agree with this 100% Sarah Richards.

Human writing is on demand more than ever. Especially writing that is accessible. Your lawyers must be able to identify and use words that get them closer to whoever you want to touch.Insert tweet

Good writing is greater on demand than ever: one that brings people together #contentwriting https://t.co/ZtYTwGfdVm

— Manuel Pueyo (@manuelpueyo) February 21, 2019

Technical Skills: the web is here to stay

Your lawyers must be able to understand the difference between a normal document and a web document. HTML basics need to be appreciated and understood:

*hyper links,lists

*headings,

*basic SEO keywords and

*other markup language specs

Method and discipline: practice makes it perfect

Ann Handley, the author of the book “Everybody Writes” calls this your Writing GPS. A method (like a GPS) gives you orientation on where to go and what to do next. Writing is a craft and every writer must have a stablished method to create a text.

This process often goes from an idea to planning your text, to writing it, to uploading it, to the Content Management System, maintaining it after publication etc. Here we are talking about having a step by step method that guides you throughout this process.

Once you repeat this method long enough, the process of writing becomes so much easier. I always quote here K Anders Ericson. Experts are made, not born: it is the quantity and the quality of the repetition of your method that will make you an expert.

Content ops: collaborate even if it hurts

Your lawyers should be team workers as well. They are not lonely runners, but they understand that their writing is inserted into a bigger system: a well oiled editorial production machine. Welcome to the world of Content Operations.

I am Manuel from BigKids and I want to help you with this. That is why we have teamed up with Larcier to run the course Creer du Contenu Digital Interessant in which we are going to talk about writing methods, how to attract people with content and the beauty of the web as a publishing medium.

Legal Content as a Valuable Business Asset: Some concrete examples

Manuel Pueyo · Jul 27, 2020 ·

Magic happens when you valorise your content. You turn knowledge that your company has but is invisible into something tangible that has amazing business value for your organization.

In this post, I would like to show how the content that you put on your website can be an amazing opportunity, not only to attract clients, but also to deliver better services. Content becomes a strategic business asset for your organization.

Modelovereenkomsten, or the principle of giving legal content for free and getting something in return

Modelovereenkomsten is a new service offered by law firm IntoLaw.

With this new service, they offer everyone the possibility to download a professional model of a contract in an editable “word” document for free. Whaat!!? Yes you hear it well, they are actually giving out some of the firm’s key 🗝️ knowledge for free. If, as a client, you want more, for instance you want to have 30 minutes chat with one lawyer, then you pay a small fee or more if you want higher customization of your contract.

The checkout process is similar to many e-commerce sites. You can search via keywords the type of contract you are looking for. You can also go through an automated workflow asking you questions and guiding you towards the contract(s) that covers your needs. When you find it, you add your contract to a cart and go through a purchase journey that incorporates some offers

They also collect your email and ask you some additional questions via the checkout process that probably will be used to profile you for marketing purposes in the future.
They also offer you similar contracts to the one you are interested in.

This service helps Intolaw to fulfill their social mission/have a positive impact in society and at the same time attract potential customers.

Mlexmarketinsight: generating legal content is the business value

They make money in a different way. Mlexmarketinsight’s value proposition is literally information (=content) sent by email. Customers pay and then they get their newsletters called Daily Briefing directly sent with the latest insights and analysis on regulatory changes, official statements and upcoming events. They also send articles written by them and press releases.

The key activity of Mlexmarketinsight is to follow changes in the sector, reporting and delivering information to paying subscribers. Channels are digital and the additional cost of getting a new client is almost zero because the additional charges for creating and sending a newsletter to 1 or to 1000 people is zero.

A privacy statement that looks good and is easy to understand and accept

Last year I had the chance to meet Lieke Beelen, she is a legal designer & founder of Visualcontracts. At this year’s Visual Contracts meetup she talked about turning legal contracts from “necessary evil” to an “object of design” = something that has a value.

And here you have an example of that: Apple privacy statement with belgian clients.

Legal contracts and technical specs are, traditionally, complicated to read for average citizens. Nobody enjoys reading them and they are often signed with blind eyes.

This can be changed, here we have an example of legal contracts and technical specs that have been simplified, beautified and explained.

When I read this web I even feel curious to know more about Apple technology and how the privacy rights are displayed in each of the apps. In general, I am not a fan of Apple as a company, but I see that this moves the needle towards more clients trusting their products and, as a consequence, increasing sales.

What do all those examples have in common?

Content leaves the marketing department. It is not only a legal copy writing, a “comms” asset to attract clients, but it becomes essential in the relationship that a company has with its clients.
Content meets a need.
From pure Blogging for Lawyers to actually paying attention to the user experience
You can actually identify some content that is not being properly valorised: it can be turned into an essential part of the way you design your legal service.

Content is knowledge and here at BigKids we help you to turn your worker’s knowledge into useful digital content. By interviewing people (your lawyers) in order to analyze their successes, challenges, practices, perceptions. We identify legal trends and we document those insights in a digital format: text, audio, video. Those digital assets can be used at any time to deliver better service or promote and amplify your legal service offer.