Don’t Let Your Blogs and Content Fall Victim to COVID-19

With so many business and personal challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s easy to forget three things:
First, your clients are looking for help and advice as they confront the same challenges you and your firm are coping with today.
Second, search engine spiders continue to crawl law firm websites looking for new content and assigning rankings.
Third, as hard as it may be to imagine today, the pandemic will end and business will resume. Clients and prospects will remember those who were helpful to them.
It’s not easy to focus on blogs and adding new webpages when you’re working in your home and handling clients while bored kids are wanting attention, maybe a dog is running around the house who also wants you to play or the cat decides your keyboard is the perfect place to walk across, and when just going to the store for food is a daunting task.
But remaining pertinent and valuable to your clients is more important now than ever.

Keeping Blogs and Content Relevant

It’s possible to be relevant and providing useful information while still reminding readers of your area of expertise. Here are a few examples of how we’ve helped clients do both.

• For a law firm specializing in technology matters, we wrote a blog about how companies can protect their IT infrastructure with employees using their own computers, tablets and phones as they work at home.
• For a family law firm, we wrote a blog on how to rene­gotiate child visitation schedules with COVID-19 still rampaging through the country.
• For a litigation firm focusing on insurance defense, we wrote about how the courts are operating now and what the changes will mean for any pending or potential cases the firm is handling or may handle in the coming months.

Each provides actionable information to help save a reader’s business while reminding readers that the resource has their best interests in mind.

Offer Ideas, Not Just Information—But Don’t Sell

What readers are desperate for now are ideas that will help their business when many firms and companies feel as if they are on their knees.
We run competitive analyses for our law firm clients on an on-going basis and saw that a firm of patent attorneys posted a blog that was nothing but the modified hours of the patent office in Washington during the pandemic. How does that help a reader? Few companies or inventors file their own patent application. Patent laws are complex and the requirements for filing an application require them to be precise and specific. If every box is not properly ticked off, the submission will be returned. Only patent lawyers know how to file an application and follow up with the USPTO, so why was this firm providing hours of operation?
We have seen similar blogs and client e-mails that help nobody. They especially do not help the firm or attorney that posted the item or sent out the communique.
Nor does it help anybody when the blog, an email blasted out to the list or a new webpage is little more than a thinly-disguised “sales pitch.” In fact, this sort of content is tone deaf and insulting. Yes, people still are retaining lawyers but they are hiring in a very different way than in the past and are looking for different things.

Write About What Readers Need Today

More than ever, people are looking to their suppliers–and those they may need tomorrow–for help, guidance and solid ideas for doing business during the pandemic.
It’s become a cliché to say that COVID-19 has changed everything. What it hasn’t changed is the need to provide useful information to people. Blogs are always supposed to do this. Writing about what readers need to know in the context of the pandemic is more important than ever so that your content is not another victim of COVID-19.

Jim Bliwas

Law marketing veteran Jim Bliwas has spent most of his career working in and with law firms in the U.S. and Canada. He is senior marketing and communications strategist for Professional Services Marketing LLP, and managing director of Leaner Law Marketing Strategies. Reach him at Jim@PSM-Marketing.com.

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