Editor’s Note: The Edge is a weekly newsletter for the leaders, partners, and marketing and business development teams at midsize law firms. Our first two editions covered macro issues involving the midsize market. This week, we tackle a more granular and practical marketing challenge. 

Thought leadership is one of the most important weapons in a law firm’s business development arsenal—and one of the trickiest to wield.

During the last several years, I’ve been asked to evaluate the content produced by law firms across the country and to help them create new strategies for building more effective thought leadership. And I’ve learned that firms often share the same four major problems in creating and positioning their thought leadership content. 

In this post, I’ll explore those four issues in greater detail and offer advice about how firms might address them.

WHAT IS THOUGHT LEADERSHIP?

Before we go any further, let’s define our terms. This definition of thought leadership from The New York Times’ content licensing arm seems apt: “Thought leadership content is information from experts who have shown measurable experience in a given industry or topic.” Brands leverage this content “to establish themselves as an authoritative source for the information their audience finds valuable.” 

In other words, this is content meant to educate, inform, and highlight your credibility and subject-matter knowledge. Think of it as the law firm version of “soft power.” You are using non-coercive messaging and your firm’s expertise and talent to convince current and prospective clients to take action. 

In a recent survey of corporate leaders conducted by LinkedIn and Edelman, nearly three-quarters said an organization’s thought leadership was “a more trustworthy basis for assessing its capabilities and competencies” than traditional marketing. Seventy percent said they are “very likely to think more positively about organizations that consistently produce high-quality thought leadership,” and 60 percent said good thought leadership “makes them willing to pay a premium to work with that organization.”

FOUR COMMON CHALLENGES

In spite of its critical importance to marketing and business development efforts, law firms routinely face the following challenges:

1. Content Is Not Built for Clients.  For this post, I looked over the results of content evaluations I’ve conducted over the last three years, and I discovered something fairly striking. At nearly every firm, two-thirds of the content failed to speak directly to clients and their needs. Thought leadership materials might alert a client that something had happened in the courts or regulatory agencies, but they did not provide context about what the issue means for a business, nor did they offer steps a client might take in response. 

This was, by no means, a scientific sample. But it suggests a potentially critical shortcoming in much of the thought leadership emanating from firms. If readers perceive that a firm’s content lacks context or fails to help them meet the challenges and opportunities confronting their businesses, why would they engage? 

Advice: Ensure thought leadership clearly explains its relevance to clients and offers practical, actionable guidance that they can use to respond to a development. Do not simply rely on one line near the end of an article that advises clients to “check their policies.” Authors should ask the following: How does the issue I am writing about affect clients?; Have I explicitly explained why the issue matters to them?; Have I given clients concrete steps to take in response? 

2. Promotional Messages Drown Out High-Value Content. Clients are looking for practical insights that can help them with their specific business challenges. Yet the stream of content from many firms is dominated by promotional material that emphasizes firm achievements or activities. Thought leadership may represent only a small percentage of the content clients are seeing from the firm.

Consistency is key in building trust and maintaining a presence in the minds of your clients. If your firm’s thought leadership pieces are published sporadically amid a stream of promotional items, it can be difficult to build a loyal readership. Clients and prospects may lose interest or look elsewhere for reliable information.

Advice: Shift your focus to educational content and implement a regular publishing schedule to plan and organize content releases. Try not to mix promotional messages with your thought leadership items. Doing so can undermine readers’ trust and also make your website less attractive to search engines.

3. Thought Leadership and Business Priorities Are Not Aligned. Certain practices or industry areas may be churning out a great deal of thought leadership, but firms sometimes fail to ask: Do these areas represent the firm’s business priorities? Does a flood of content from a particular practice send the message that this is the firm’s primary area of expertise? Are areas that employ most of the firm’s lawyers offering little in the way of valuable content to clients? 

Depending on the answers to these questions, your firm may be developing content gaps just where thought leadership marketing would be most valuable. As a result, the firm could be missing opportunities to demonstrate expertise in areas critical to future growth.

Advice: Determine whether strategic priorities are adequately represented in your thought leadership output and adjust content production to close gaps and highlight the firm’s expertise across its key service areas. Firm leaders may need to encourage and incentivize lawyers to participate and offer support to marketers as they attempt to balance content across practices.

4. Firms Are Unsure About What Clients Want. Many firms are unclear about clients’ information needs, the way they would like to consume content, how often they want to hear from the firm, and what drives them to read a law firm article, listen to a podcast, or watch a video. Without these data points, firms may be delivering material that is unhelpful and that, from the client’s perspective, is yet another example of internet noise. 

Advice: Regularly gathering and analyzing client feedback can help law firms refine and adapt their content strategies. Solicit feedback from clients. Survey them formally or informally. Pay attention to the issues they are attempting to address with their customers or clients, and partner with them to deliver insights.

TAKEAWAY

By focusing on client-centric content, prioritizing educational over promotional messaging, aligning thought leadership with business priorities, and actively seeking client feedback, midsize law firms can develop a robust thought leadership strategy. Doing so can yield significant rewards: Firms that excel at thought leadership gain a powerful tool that can help foster deeper client relationships and drive business growth.

Do you have questions, feedback, or topics you would like The Edge to cover? Send a note to david@good2bsocial.com.