In 2014 content marketing will be key to promoting your firm to your clients.  A full 90% of consumers find custom content useful and 78% believe that organisations providing custom content are interested in building good relationships with them (see more interesting facts on content marketing here). Blogs and newsletters are excellent content marketing tools.  They can allow you to fully connect with different types of people and provide the sort of additional service and free information that creates client loyalty and brand recognition. So what are the key differences between the two? Blogs are generally shorter, around 500 words but they can be longer if need be.  Posted on your website they focus on specific subjects and can be quite informal in their language.  They are designed to provide topical, interesting, authoritative information to your readers on a regular basis. Newsletters are more formal.  They can consist of your firm’s latest events, staff promotions and changes, the latest cases that your authors have worked on and in-depth, referenced articles. A regular blog on your website can give your business the following advantages:

•  They provide authoritative legal information to assist your clients in clear, straightforward language that they can be easily understand.
• They help improve and maintain your SEO (search engine optimisation) by adding regular, fresh, definitive content to your website.
• You can easily share a blog via social media to increase your website’s visibility.
• Readers can leave comments allowing you to create a dialogue with them.
• You can track the readership of your blog through your web analytics program and use the information to adjust the topics you blog about accordingly.

The benefits of sending out an ongoing newsletter are:

• As they are generally emailed to clients you can keep updated records of client contact details.
• You can cover many topics in a single issue.
• More formal, referenced articles can be included.
• You can alert clients to upcoming events within your firm.
• Case law and legislation changes can be included to keep your clients up to date on recent developments within practice areas of  particular interest to them.

Although newsletters and blogs may take some time to put together (not to mention the effort in coming up with unique ideas for the content), they are well worth using to keep your clients up to date and informed.  Studies show that people will take the time to read blogs and/or articles from organisations they are interested in.  By providing your clients with regular, useful information via a newsletter or blog you will keep them returning to your website and office over and over again.