Prioritize Frequency Over Caliber in Your
Law Firm’s Content Marketing Program
The quality of your marketing and business development
content isn’t as important as its frequency.
Woody Allen famously said 80% of success in life is just showing up.
I can’t comment on how right he is regarding all areas of life, but he is spot on when it comes to law firms’ content marketing and thought-leadership marketing efforts.
It’s imperative that any lawyer or law firm wanting to engage in a serious content marketing or thought-leadership marketing campaign consistently create content for that campaign. They need to understand that consistently producing B+ content is better than inconsistently producing A+ content.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that in the abstract B+ content is better than A+ content. If you can consistently produce A+ content, great. But consistently creating very good content will always trump inconsistently creating excellent content.
Here are three reasons why consistently creating content is the key to a successful content marketing or thought-leadership marketing campaign.
Consistency Builds Credibility and Trust (in Addition to Authority)
When you create compelling marketing and business development content, especially thought-leadership content, you are, of course, building authority. You become known as someone knowledgeable about the areas of law you are writing about.
But when you do it consistently on a regular basis, your audience—referral sources, clients or other third parties—will begin to expect you will be publishing content on a regular basis. And when you regularly show up in your audiences’ email inboxes, social media feeds, or podcast players you will build credibility and trust with them. Your consistency will be perceived as reliability. With reliability comes credibility and trustworthiness.
(Your target audiences might think that if you are this reliable with your marketing efforts, you’d be just as, if not even more, reliable when serving as their lawyer.)
For example, let’s say you are on a weekly basis publishing a blog post or a podcast. Or, on a monthly basis, you are creating some kind of round-up article about SEC enforcement actions. Or, on a quarterly basis, you are researching and publishing a report about developments at the FDA.
In doing so consistently, you or your firm become known as THE lawyer or law firm publishing that content. And then, eventually, because of your consistent publishing of that content, and the credibility and trust it brings, you or your firm are likely to become known, more generally, as THE go-to lawyer or law firm regarding the areas of law you cover in your content, which are of course the areas of law you practice.
Consistency Gives You More Opportunities to Get in Front of Your Target Audiences
Consistently creating content gives you multiple bites at the apple, multiple swings of the bat, multiple shots on goal, or whatever metaphor or analogy you prefer for getting more opportunities to reach your target audiences.
These additional opportunities come in two forms.
First, the more content you create and publish in third-party publications and on your firm’s website and social media channels, the more opportunities for members of your target audiences to find you. If you publish content once a week versus once a month, you will produce more than 4x as much content. That’s more than 4x as many opportunities for you to appear in publications your target audiences consume, more than 4x as many links in your online bio or on your firm’s website to your content for your audiences to click, and more than 4x as many opportunities for social media algorithms (Hello there, LinkedIn) to serve your content to the people who follow you.
Second, the more content you create and publish, the more topics you can cover. This provides you with more opportunities to craft content that is relevant to your target audiences, and more opportunities to show the range of legal and business issues you can help clients with by creating content regarding those issues.
All of this content also helps with the credibility and trust I mentioned above. When people discover you for the first time and then see you’ve got a huge back catalog of content, you can’t help but be seen as a trusted and credible authority regarding the area(s) of law you’re covering in your content.
Consistent Content Creation Gives You Access to Important Audience Signals
Finally, when you consistently create and publish content, you become privy to information you might not have been privy to if you didn’t produce so much content. Importantly, you’ll see who your supporters are and trends regarding how people are consuming your content.
You’ll see the people who are consistently opening and clicking the links in your emails. You’ll see the people who are liking, sharing, and commenting on your social media posts.
These individuals are sending you important signals. Their actions are telling you the topics they’re interested in consuming and, likely, learning more about. And, the people who consistently engage with your content could be telling you they’re in need of someone like you based on legal and business issues they, their company, or someone they know are struggling with.
In the aggregate, when you consistently produce content, you’ll also receive signals about the topics that tend to get consumed by your audience. You’ll see which topics tend to get more engagement than others, and thus, which topics you should continue to create content about. On the flip side, you’ll see more quickly which topics are duds because you’ll have a larger sample size of content. If particular topics routinely underperform others, you’ll know to stay away from them in the future.
If you listen to these signals, over time, your content should become more compelling and receive more engagement because you’re giving your audience the kind of content they want—and you are getting more adept at crafting it.
Consistent Creation of Very Good Content > Inconsistent Creation of Excellent Content
I know it might sound crazy that the consistent creation of content is a bigger driver of success in a content marketing or thought-leadership marketing program than the quality of that content. But it’s true. Again, don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating for C- or D+ content. What I am saying is consistently creating B+ content will always trump inconsistently creating A+ content.
The more content you create, the more opportunities you will get to build your authority and develop credibility and trust in the eyes of your target audiences, reach them and give them the opportunity to engage with you and your content, and listen to signals from your audience you wouldn’t have otherwise been privy to.
Sure, you could unlock these opportunities through inconsistently publishing excellent content. But it will take a while—long enough for an enterprising competitor who consistently creates very good content to establish themselves among your target audiences, and to do so at your firm’s expense.
Wayne Pollock, a former Am Law 50 senior litigation associate, is the founder of Copo Strategies, a legal services and communications firm, and the Law Firm Editorial Service, a content strategy and ghostwriting service for lawyers and their law firms. The Law Firm Editorial Service sets free the knowledge and wisdom trapped inside Big Law and boutique law firm partners by collaborating with them to strategize and ethically ghostwrite book-of-business-building marketing and business development content. Contact him at waynepollock@copostrategies.com.
Reprinted with permission from the August 30, 2022, edition of The Legal Intelligencer © 2022 ALM Media Properties, LLC. All rights reserved. Further duplication without permission is prohibited, contact 877–257–3382 or reprints@alm.com.