Creating effective marketing content

Achieve your revenue goals by producing content that's irresistible to your target audience

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Last week I wrote an article detailing how to generate repeatable sales for your legal startup. At the end, I described the importance of creating marketing content that’s unusually compelling to your target audience:

Most content is terrible and is designed to help companies generate revenue quickly. E.g. “Here’s a new buyer’s guide for software! Sign up for our ebook today.” Problem is, that type of content doesn’t get people excited or interested in consuming it. So no one signs up. But believe me—if your content is indeed compelling to your target audience, they will put in the legwork to promote it to their peers.

Although my article was focused on legal startups, I believe that law firms face similar challenges. Most firms market by sharing their knowledge of some area of law, usually through client updates or on the website. As you can imagine, this content is often ineffective in helping firms generate more revenue.

Today I’d like to share my framework for generating irresistible marketing content. I developed these ideas over the course of my entire career, especially the past 7 years in legal tech. Longtime readers know that I started off in legal tech startup sales, where we often didn’t have mature marketing organizations or corporate brands to help us get leads. I had to figure out how to make my own content and distribute it, in order to generate enough revenue to hit my targets.

This article focuses on the substance of marketing content, as opposed to the form. It’s likely that your head of marketing knows how to run campaigns, parse through analytics data, and lead teams that can scale out your promotional efforts. So I’m not going to discuss those topics here. Instead I’ll talk about how to figure out what your content should say, what medium the message should be delivered, and how to promote the content itself.

Outline

1. Produce content that speaks to the specific, unique challenges that your ideal customer/client faces

   1. Rule of thumb: Highlight problems that your offering solves

   2. Align with the proper stage of the buying cycle

2. Design content using the right medium that helps you achieve your goals

   1. Figure out what you’d like to accomplish first

   2. If you’re small, you should be focused on generating leads

3. Share your content where your ICP likes to spend time

   1. Compelling content generates its own distribution

   2. You can also pay for quick results

Related articles: How to create repeatable sales for your legal startup; Overcoming the timing problem; The right way to do LinkedIn; Optimizing your LinkedIn profile page for marketing; Marketing by engaging with the community