On April 5, 2025, the 75-day reprieve on TikTok’s national ban will expire. Content creators around the world risk losing tremendous visibility and professional exposure. Creators, influencers, and even some lawyers may soon struggle to find alternative content-sharing avenues. The lawyers among them can leverage multiple established marketing strategies; their challenge may be choosing one.
Imagine the results of a single-question poll asking attorneys and legal marketers to describe the most effective content marketing strategy for law firms. Responses would range from podcasts to thought leadership articles to conference presentations to social media and more.
We can endlessly debate each answer’s comparative merit, but the imaginary poll’s best response—and the most lawyerlike answer—is all the above. An impactful plan requires synchronizing these individual strategies into a cohesive roadmap of legal content.
The benefits of synchronization are apparent: building credibility, maximizing reach, reinforcing brand identity, streamlining client experience, and optimizing resources. The challenge lies in bringing this content coordination to fruition.
First, ascertain the firm’s goals. What does the firm hope to achieve with each particular piece of content and with a marketing strategy more globally? Is it to attract new clients? Retain current clients? Spotlight particular attorneys? Reach a new geographic market? Demonstrate expertise in a specific practice area?
Keeping these goals in mind, start with a basic calendar. Planning a full year in advance should be the final target but can be ambiguous and overwhelming to start. For planning newcomers, a six-month calendar is ideal and manageable while allowing ample time to prepare. Despite the appeal of a more compact timeframe, planning less than six months ahead limits options.
There is no need to begin with complex content planning software. Like the twelve-month calendar, that is a long-range objective. Any calendar app or paper desk calendar will suffice.
Before moving on to the next stage of coordination, populate your calendar. Begin with external deadlines, including publication (and article submission) dates of relevant publications’ external calendars – both legal and industry specific.
Then turn to conference (and speaker submission due) dates. Conferences and other speaking engagements offer a variety of avenues to use content and otherwise connect with clients, potential clients and referral sources.
Having accounted for the two traditional categories of externally-controlled content, add firm-directed opportunities. The firm’s own plans are more flexible but should sync with the roadmap structured by external timelines. If, for example, an attorney is invited to speak at a conference, consider planning thought leadership or blog publication on the subject matter—both before and after the conference.
Publication the month before the engagement presents the attorney as knowledgeable, hopefully leading to increased attendance at the presentation. Early preparation for the conference is a bonus; and since the content mirrors the article’s subject, the attorney should have the content ready at least a month in advance of the conference.
Publication following the conference offers multiple benefits with limited additional effort by the lawyer who has already prepared the content for the speaking engagement: (1) reaching potential clients or referral sources who may not have been at the conference, (2) reinforcement of the author’s status as an expert through exposure in multiple channels, and (3) expansion of the firm’s reputation across those channels.
Similarly, if the firm plans to publish a thought leadership article on a particular subject and the opportunity to speak at a relevant and timely conference is unavailable, coordinate the writing with firm-directed speaking opportunities. Offer a webinar to an industry group or a CLE course, and do not lose the cross-selling opportunity; let all clients know about an upcoming event, not just those located in a particular geographic area or practice area.
If your firm has its own podcast, adding appearances based on external deadlines is simple. If not, reach out directly to podcast hosts and producers, and do not limit your search to legal podcasts. Like written materials, send to industry-focused podcasts in addition to (or even instead of) legal-themed podcasts.
Podcasts, like speaking engagements and social media, offer marketing options that writing lacks, including reaching a different—and expanded—audience. According to Edison Research’s Infinite Dial 2024 Report, podcast listening among Americans grew 450% between 2014 and 2024. Approximately 135 million Americans are monthly podcast listeners and an estimated 98 million are weekly podcast listeners.
The number of potential listeners is reason enough to incorporate podcasts into your content plans. Compare the number of podcast listeners with traditional legal content consumers, readers. ALM, which publishes 20 legal publications around the world and law.com, boasts an average of 1.58 million unique monthly visitors to law.com and a total print readership of 400,000. Your podcast would have to reach .3% of monthly podcast listeners in the United States to reach more people than the combined print readership of all 20 ALM print publications. While there is no guarantee that your podcast will always reach your desired audience, the same is true of written publication, and the sheer number of podcast listeners makes participation worthwhile.
Also, podcasts offer the potential to make personal connections that emerge more easily through conversation than through writing. While some clients may choose attorneys based on expertise conveyed through thought leadership without regard to personality, others may seek attorneys they feel they relate to on a personal level. That personal resonance comes across on podcasts and may be most effective for attorneys whose preferred marketing method is chatting.
Attorney preference is integral in developing a cohesive marketing plan. Law firms may pair attorneys based on strengths and favorite marketing activity. A pair of attorneys may co-present at the conference mentioned above, while the “I-prefer-writing attorney” writes a thought leadership article the prior month, and the “I-prefer-to-chat attorney” is a latter month podcast guest. The likelihood of individual success is greater as the attorneys work off their strengths, and the firm succeeds by promoting two experts across multiple channels (including social media promotion of all three events) with in-depth preparation for only one event.
Each content strategy or event is valuable, but its benefits multiply as part of a cohesive plan. Content delivery is simply more effective with synchronization.
