Four Ways to Leverage AI to Optimize Your Legal Content Marketing

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a mainstay in the delivery of legal services. As firms scramble to employ more advanced software tools, expert systems and AI-­based solutions, legal marketers are also finding ways to optimize interactions with clients and prospects.

Building and growing a successful firm requires a focus on both operations and marketing, and AI can help you effectively optimize both. However, if not done correctly, building new processes and capabilities into your firm's website can quickly become a time­consuming and costly endeavor with no return on investment to speak of.

Engaging Visitors with AI

Far too often, legal firms fill their websites with flat content that fails to engage visitors. Poor design, a lack of communication options, and no real path to extend your content's reach through social engagement show that you aren't employing available technologies to their fullest potential. Smart marketers spend as much time on content distribution as they do on the production of that thought leadership content.

Boosting your website's UX with AI­based content recommendation engines will amplify those distribution efforts on your website, increasing client and prospect engagement. Here are a few simple steps you can take to get started.

Optimize Content Search

More and more often, advanced users with short attention spans leverage website search to surface information they're looking for, not even bothering with a site's navigation capabilities. According to Kissmetrics, 40 percent of users like to use search more than navigation.

If implementing advanced search and machine learning algorithms isn't an option for your firm, at least ensure your content is properly tagged and that on­site search is fast and effective for users who choose to go that route. If your web technology allows, investigate more advanced options.

The Bryan Cave website , for example, has employed AI technologies, including customized topic modeling algorithms and machine learning to optimize the visitor experience. Its smart tool is specifically designed for the legal sector to surface content to time­crunched visitors almost instantly.

Leverage Content Recommendation Engines

Recommendation and personalization engines differentiate popular subscription­based services from their competition even more than their content libraries, which are often shared. In the same way consumer­focused firms like Netflix and Spotify analyze their content to recommend content to subscribers, your firm can analyze its site visitors to recommend optimal firm content for their consumption.

Whether it's thought leadership, related client alerts, attorney profiles or even live access to your firm's lawyers, providing the right content to the right audience at the right time improves engagement all around for your firm's brand. This builds stronger relationships, which leads to more business.

What matters most is how you deliver the information, yet most firms are still only focusing their digital marketing efforts on expanding their thought leadership platforms. Instead, custom­built content recommendation engines, or hosted solutions, can enhance visitors' online experiences and perceptions of your firm.

Use New Conversational and Voice Interfaces

While I'm not yet convinced that law firms need voice recognition in their marketing arsenal, it doesn't hurt to consider this in the near future. Just as topics like mobile­first optimization, search engine optimization, social media marketing and website accessibility were once relatively obscure, eventually voice services will also become ubiquitous (and necessary) as user adoption increases.

Alexa, Siri, Google Home and other voice assistants are becoming commonplace. One day, the types of searches being performed using these IoT devices may be as instrumental as mobile optimization to your website's sustainability.

Users increasingly expect to obtain information—whether it's the address of a firm's local office or the latest client alert about mobile payments—via the same voice interfaces they use on their personal devices to get the weather or order a refill for their water filters.

Collect All the Data You Can

Most law firms see relatively low traffic compared to consumer news, large e­commerce, video streaming and gaming websites. This makes big data analysis impractical and even impossible if you can't even gather enough data to effectively analyze. Collect whatever data you can now, as you will ultimately find a use for it down the line as tools evolve and your data accumulates.

If your firm isn't opposed to including a call to action in its content, you could analyze the click­through rates for that element. In fact, with the right goals and data, you can leverage AI to optimize your content and configuration to drive the action on your website and beyond.

Whether your firm is prepared or not, AI is here and continuing to grow and evolve. The question isn't whether you should you jump on the bandwagon; it's when will it be too late?

There was once a time when law firms didn't even have websites. Now, it's necessary to have one that's intelligent enough to cater to every visitor's needs. While it might sound overwhelming, you don't need to be as smart as your computer to harness its power for your benefit—you just need to focus time, energy and resources in the right places.