How a Podcast Can Benefit Your Law Firm
Effective content marketing strategies for lawyers include creating, distributing, and analyzing content across multiple platforms and channels. It requires understanding your law firm’s target audiences, what they want or should know, and how to best communicate with them.
Staying current and up to date with trends is crucial to being competitive, and podcasts are a tool that can reach important audiences and deliver several benefits. Those who listen to podcasts are highly engaged, and lawyers can leverage this tool to develop and improve relationships and meet business goals.
The great thing about podcasts is they aren’t expensive to create and distribute. But just like content on websites, blogs, social media profiles, newsletters, and other platforms, every podcast should have a defined purpose. It should align with your law firm’s brand, entice – and hook – listeners, demonstrate authority, and have clear value.
What are the Benefits of a Podcast?
The most successful legal podcasts keep the attention of listeners by speaking in a way and format they’ll understand and relate to. Ultimately, they provide relevant and important information based on a specific topic, and the benefits are extensive.
When properly created and distributed, podcasts can:
1. Increase brand awareness
The digital landscape is highly competitive. Creating and maintaining a space for your law firm online not only takes time but must include a variety of content that is consistently branded and regularly published. Podcasts are a worthwhile marketing tool because they raise awareness of your brand and expertise, which sets the stage for topic authority on the practice areas a lawyer specializes in.
2. Reach and engage target audiences
Podcasts are yet another way lawyers can be more visible and extend their reach. They can be highly engaging because the audience is actively seeking something. They choose to listen, but a firm’s personality and the way they present audio content is what keeps them tuned in.
Podcasts allow lawyers to demonstrate their passion and expertise through the way they speak.
Podcasts can also encourage the audience to directly engage with your firm. For example, asking listeners to submit questions that would be answered on the next podcast not only gives them the opportunity to learn more but makes them feel connected and heard.
When the intended audience is other lawyers, podcasts can provide opportunities to develop relationships that may lead to referrals. Asking a lawyer you want to do business with to be a guest on your firm’s podcast can foster a new relationship and expand your professional network and influence.
3. Maintain existing relationships
Podcasts can help law firms maintain their existing relationships too. Keeping an existing audience engaged through important, high-quality information of interest to them helps maintain brand awareness and reinforces credibility and authority. When podcasts are done well, law firms develop a dedicated following made of the audience members that are key to business success.
4. Build credibility and topic authority
Another benefit of podcasts is the ability to demonstrate your law firm’s knowledge and expertise in specific practice areas, which is necessary to build credibility and topic authority. If a podcast is targeted at potential clients, they need to hear information that convinces them of your skills.
One of the best reasons podcasts can be a highly effective content marketing tool for law firms is that the audience has come looking for something specific. They’ve chosen your podcast because of the name and description – but it’s also likely they Googled your firm and the lawyer who hosts it. Once they’re convinced of your credentials and experience, the value of what’s said and why it’s important must be clear.
5. Become a gateway to other content
Leveraging several communications channels, including podcasts, helps create gateways to additional content that furthers and improves the listener’s experience with your firm. It also contributes to your credibility. Lawyers can lead the audience on a journey that will benefit them, to related information on your firm’s website, free legal guide, social media channels, and so on. This increases your exposure and reach, communicates key messages and calls to action, and contributes to developing topic authority.
6. Generate leads
This benefit – generating leads – goes hand in hand with the previously listed benefits; brand awareness, audience engagement, maintaining relationships, demonstrating credibility, and helping the audience learn more are all factors that contribute to garnering leads.
If the right people are tuning in, such as those with specific legal needs, podcasts can include some soft and hard sells. Focusing on your law firm’s experience and success in your practice areas, as well as giving a phone number or website to request a free consultation at the end of the episode, can set the stage for leads.
Example of an Effective Legal Podcast
There are many well-known legal podcasts out there, but what makes them stand out? Let’s take a look at the Trial Lawyer View. This podcast is hosted by Jason D. Lazarus and has gained a solid audience comprised of trial lawyers. The website’s description outright says the show is for trial lawyers, describing them as “modern-day warriors who fight for the injured.”
The podcast’s purpose is clear: they talk about relevant issues trial lawyers face and discuss how to improve the industry. They also cover a few other aspects of running a practice, letting the audience know the host and his guests are entrenched in the world of trial law.
The Trial Lawyer View’s episodes range from around 25 minutes to an hour and a half. Each episode has a short but detailed description of what’s covered at different points and who the guest is. The latter is especially important because it helps build the credibility of the podcast; hosting guests that are leaders in the industry.
There’s also a dedicated page that gives credence to the host, and its message is clear: Jason Lazarus is more than qualified to lead discussions about being a trial lawyer and the issues that matter to those in the profession.
Legal Podcasts are a Valuable Tool
Whether aimed at other lawyers, potential clients, or current clients, the benefits of a quality legal podcast are extensive. Breaking through the noise of the internet and solidifying a place for your law firm takes time. But through the use of podcasts, in combination with other content marketing tools, lawyers can see real results. You just have to do it properly – with a targeted plan, defined messages, and consistent branding.
Consider adding a podcast to your marketing efforts today. There are millions of people actively seeking information through podcasts, and your law firm could become their go-to source for specific legal topics.
