Digital White Papers

I L T A W H I T E P A P E R | M A R K E T I N G T E C H N O L O G Y 16 C O N T E N T T H A T K I L L S : H O W T O C R E A T E S T R A T E G I C A L L Y T A R G E T E D C O N T E N T T O A T T R A C T B U S I N E S S Stephanie Richter is Senior Website and Digital Marketing Specialist for Thompson Coburn LLP. By managing the website across multiple departments utilizing an agile framework, she works closely with members of the firm's IT and communications departments as well as attorneys and firm leadership. Stephanie has built on this by creating the firm's data reporting program, developing succinct monthly and quarterly dashboards for decision-makers on website and content performance as well as the digital engagement of top clients. Prior to entering the legal field, she worked in the biotech and manufacturing industries focusing on digital and non- digital marketing. undoubtedly lead to more pageviews due to increased exposure. Introducing the Content Covenant So that's how you generate valuable, strategic content without wasting attorney time. To borrow a legal (and biblical) term, we've described this beautiful process as a type of "covenant" with our content creators. The marketing department's part of the covenant: • Maintain a secure, user-friendly website as a platform for content. • Provide topics and titles that work best for the attorney's goals and our digital audience. • Distribute content to the best of our ability and closely monitor any changes in search engine algorithms that could affect the performance of our site or content. • Provide relevant data to the attorney's group on how that content is performing. The attorney part of the covenant: • Try to incorporate marketing's suggestions into content. • Commit to creating multiple pieces of content to The marketing department then returns a report back to the attorney providing a specific content strate, complete with topic suggestions, title recommendations, and ideas for next steps. In turn, the marketing department comes away with a better understanding of this content creator's goals, options for more effective tagging and metadata on her content, and a much clearer sense of how and where the content should be distributed. How to measure for value How do we know this process works? We've closely tracked the performance of strategic content vs. non- strategic content, and the numbers (and number of eyes on the pieces) speak for themselves. These are some of the data points we measure to see if our content is actually finding its audience. First is the average "time on page," or "TOP," which measures how engaged visitors are with the content. Set a threshold for what a "significant" amount of time means for your firm based on your existing content and then measure against that benchmark. When a piece of content consistently has a high average TOP, what usually follows is an improvement in our second metric: position in search results. Search engines rank engaging pages highly, and TOP is the best indicator for how intently an audience is engaging with your content. So if you've generated a healthy TOP metric, that should boost your search engine rankings, ideally for the specific search terms you set out to conquer. Finally, a top rank with search engines will

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