We get asked a lot about how to know what content to create. The short and most appropriate answer is, ask the internet. But there are lot’s of ways to do that kind of research. Your best buyers are searching for solutions to problems they are experiencing every day. It’s our job to help them find answers.
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How to research content marketing ideas
The best way to research ideas for content marketing is to literally go to Google, YouTube, social media search engines and start typing. In this video you’ll see what I mean.
What’s up, everybody. Here talking to you today about how to maximize your potential for getting in front of new clients. All by answering questions. It’s a novel idea.
It’s definitely something that people can easily just do some quick internet research. Yes, the pools might be small, but they’re very specific. This is an opportunity for anybody. Anyone looking to dive deep into a specific topic and are willing to spend the time to create some content along this manner.
So what I’m doing here today is showing you, and for those of you listening only, you can check out the full version on YouTube.
I’m going to show you exactly how to just start doing an internet search. Look at what people are saying. How they’re titling things and what’s coming up in the results. So before we get started, I will say a little caveat. You’re going to see a lot of extra stuff on my screen. That’s because I do this for a living.
I have a lot of tools that are installed in my browser. They help me figure out how to get in front of more people and really analyze the opportunities that are in front of us.
How to search the internet like your clients do
What you see here is the search phrase, how to start an estate plan.
Now, I did this for a very specific reason. All you need to do to get in front of people, “how to” is one of the number one most searched phrases on the internet in general. So if you take a look at anything, a Google search, a YouTube search, I’m using YouTube in this example. Any of those channels that are a search engine, this is the best way to get started.
You’ll find that low hanging fruit, oftentimes low hanging fruit and very small competition, which we’ll actually see here. And I’m kind of excited about this. So this is an area where you can get started on. So you just literally type “how to,” and then finish your phrase in the search box here.
The one we’re focusing on is how to start an estate plan. And as I scroll down here, what you’re going to see is we’ve got ads. So people are paying to get in front of this audience.
Why is it a good sign if other attorneys are running ads online?
That is an awesome sign! If people are paying to get in front of this audience, that means it’s a valuable audience.
How to get ideas from the topics in the search results
As we scroll down, you’ll see estate planning basics, estate planning essentials, wealth council. So wealth council is actually the channel. They’re using the name of the channel in the title of the video. But if we strip that out, estate planning basics and estate planning essentials.
The next one down is setting up a living trust, estate planning facts. So they’re kind of diving into the belief that people have that they’re being lied to.
By putting facts in all capitals, the hope here is that they are providing actual facts. So, they’re playing into that emotional appeal.
How to start an estate plan, how to start an estate planning law practice, very specific to attorneys. Estate planning 101, relationships and finances. Trusts 101. So this is getting a little bit deeper into estate planning as a whole focusing on trusts as that core issue.
And you’ve got something from Dave Ramsey, not answering questions. When do we need an estate planner for our will? What is an estate plan versus a trust, versus a will, legally is in plain English.
So this person is actually taking the layman’s approach and trying to break it down into words we can all understand.
How to speak to your legal clients online
Now, keep in mind as an attorney, you speak legalese, but the common public doesn’t do that. They don’t do it. They don’t care to do it. That’s what they hire you for. So the more easy you can make it, and the more simple you can make it, the better their trust is going to be formed with you. The easier it is to form that relationship. And the more likely they are to actually trust you that you’re telling the truth. So we can go on and on and on, but a couple of things I want to point out here.
When you’re searching on YouTube specifically. So we’ll go back up to the first video here. So 17,000 views of this video. You’re joking. This is an untapped market here. Only a few people are getting this kind of traffic. Now, if you go to the next video… That video was posted a year ago, by the way, I want to be very clear with that. That video was posted a year ago, the next one on the list, 121,000 views. Now, that video is the one that lists facts in the title. So you can see how playing to some people’s internal beliefs about people lying to them, that actually helps. So, going down the list a little bit now, again, that facts video posted a year ago. A lot of these are ranking three years ago, two years ago, four years ago.
Is being topical helpful in content?
What you want to look at for today’s market because four years ago, we weren’t in a pandemic. I’m recording this on Saturday, November 14th, 2020. So you can tell we’re in the midst of the pandemic. Now this will change over time, but only a little.
You could double down and reference the pandemic within the content of the video or anything that you produce, whether it’s podcasts, a video, a blog post, article, whatever it is, it doesn’t matter.
You can reference the timeframe within that. I would caution against that because you’re dating the knowledge a little bit. So I did it for the sake of education here, helping you to understand the opportunity we have in front of us.
But what you do see is someone who’s got 56,000 views, they posted this video eight years ago. So that’s telling me that a lot of these people gave up. What you do see though, as we start scrolling down a little bit further, six steps to successful estate planning.
Leveraging principles of persuasion to capture attention
So it’s keying into a couple marketing languages, a couple of tools of persuasion, if you will, or giving somebody a concise wrap up in the title.
We’re giving them clues as to what this will give us on the outset of learning these things and we’re doing it in a very condensed fashion. So six steps to successful estate planning. So the conciseness, the very specificity that I’m talking about, six steps. Successful implies a good outcome.
Estate planning is the exact thing that we’re focused on. That was posted two months ago and has 3,100 views on it.
Part of this, you do have to take with a grain of salt. This is Chris Hogan. He actually has a very big following here on YouTube and just in general. So he’s leveraging the channel in a good way to help get seen by more people. But two months ago, 3000 views. That’s pretty damn good. As we move forward, 12,000 views, nine months ago.
Why consistency is so important in publishing content online
The whole point behind this, as I keep scrolling down, you don’t see a lot of recent education about this. Estate planning basics, straight forward. Five months ago, only 195 views. So what’s this guy not doing right? I’ll tell you, a couple things.
He probably didn’t promote it. He probably had no idea that just putting it up on YouTube was going to be helpful. Now, he is showing up in the search results. However, he’s super far down in the search results. He’s probably in the twenties down here. Five months ago, hasn’t had a whole lot of views. He’s probably not leveraging the YouTube algorithm in the right way. He’s probably not asking people to like and subscribe. He’s probably not adding the name of the video into the name of the thumbnail. He’s probably not diving deep into the SEO factor within the description. There’s a lot here that you could do from a technical aspect.
They ask questions, you answer them
The point I’m trying to make is that instead of focusing on doing all the things or on the flip side, not knowing where to start, ask the internet the question that your clients will be asking and then create content around that. It’s not a unique concept. When people ask a question, they want an answer. If you’re the one to provide that answer and you do it in a way that actually provides them value, their value, not yours. Don’t think about yourself for a bit. Provide clients value so that they walk away from that conversation and go, “I know exactly what to do now. I found this incredibly helpful and incredibly valuable. This is cool.”
So how do you research content ideas?
That’s what you want to do when you’re creating content. When you start looking at how do I actually start building an audience? How do I get people to my website?
How do I get people into my funnel? How do I create clients from people I don’t know? This is how you do it. It’s not rocket science. It’s literally the most basic principles that we all do.
When someone asks a question, you provide them the most valuable answer that you can in the best way that is perceived by them to be most valuable.
Leave a comment below if you’ve got any questions. And if you’d like to work with us, we do this for all of our clients.
We help attorneys find their best clients almost on auto-pilot every month.
