How is my/our work doing?
I hear the question (or some similar version of it) frequently when clients are ready to access analytics generated by their content on JD Supra.
Within that one question are many others that can give meaning, insight, and value to your metrics.
You should regularly look at analytics with specific questions informed by your understanding of behavior within the marketing & business development funnel and how published thought leadership matches to it.
Here's what I mean by that.
[Click here if you just want the checklist of questions.]
Forgive me if this is obvious: for people tasked with marketing and business development (or, dare I say, sales), the idea of a funnel is helpful. It enables us to understand and organize the behaviors of people who might become our clients and it helps us match our activities, set our priorities, based on those behaviors. (More on this below.)
Every stage of what so many call "the client journey" matters greatly — you can't have one without the other. McDonald's doesn't wait until you are hungry (read: interested) to start marketing to you. Like all of the most successful corporations, they're constantly maintaining awareness to be sure we never forget. Their solution remains top of mind. Would you like fries with that?
Although professional services are decidedly more complex than a cheeseburger with fries, this concept of the funnel also pertains — and is the source of some of the most important questions you can bring to your thought leadership analytics. For example:
At the top of the funnel, your activities (in this case, writing and disseminating insights and analysis) generate visibility within the largest pool of people, extending the brand, reputation, experience, and credibility of the firm and the professionals who created the content. (Every piece of content is branded to the firm and bylined to a person.)
Among this large pool of visibility we find clients, prospective clients, members of the media, referral sources, colleagues, and others whose importance may emerge downstream. So, important, big picture question:
Next, break down that broad visibility, matching it to the strategic direction of the firm or specific practice groups:
The answers to these questions (all available within your JD Supra analytics), lead to important follow-up questions that might inform your overall content plan, and/or highlight BD opportunities you didn't see before:
In this digital age of mass, quickly shared information, often awareness can generate even more awareness. So:
These questions (of which there are plenty more in the awareness phase) begin to take us to the next stage, a smaller set of that larger, vital whole:
Some of the people made aware of you by reading your thought leadership begin to develop, now or later, a deeper interest in what you have to say, and often their behavior exhibits this interest. They re-read your content; share it internally with colleagues, or externally with their own networks; follow your firm and/or individual authors to receive additional insights from you; and so on. With this in mind, questions to root out interest:
In your JD Supra analytics you can find examples of this critically important question when you see a higher count of individual reads within a specific company. It likely indicates that your content has spurred conversation within a team, or requires frequent reference. When a reader returns to your insights again and again, take this not merely as awareness. This is interest. Additional:
No brainer: your serve a company on an IP matter but they return again and again to something written by your Labor & Employment group about employee benefit plans, or cybersecurity, or remote work, or... A handful of well-placed questions in your next client call (what Clinton Gary calls Meaningful Facetime) can help to uncover if this is a new opportunity for you. And, if read actively by people at a prospective company, not yet a client, you are now armed with additional insight regarding what they care about most.
Within the shares by individual readers reported in your analytics, certain notable people will stand out. So, ask:
Look at what else they are sharing, read their updates, consider their BIOs (all available on the public, social networks in which sharing occurs, or on their blogs, as well as in your analytics dashboard). What insights can you derive from their activities and shares? Often the answer is an idea for your next writing assignment ("Thank you for sharing my post. In response to a question you asked in the share, I also wrote...")
At the spot where interest morphs into engagement, there is an additional key question to ask of your social content, which can also be answered by your JD Supra analytics:
Attorney coach Mike O'Horo once wrote that it is only business development if you are having a conversation with someone about their problem and how you are able to solve it. The rest is marketing.
I like this way of conceiving of behavior (yours and your prospects) and how it alters meaning in the funnel. While you can and should derive many strategically important business development insights from aggregate data higher up in the funnel (like an understanding of industry and company visibility), typically, most business development conversations begin during engagement. So look at:
Follow-up questions include:
Engagement happens when those interested in what you are saying — and, ultimately, in what you are offering — engage with you because you address an issue they face, a question they have, a problem that needs a solution. But the best marketers don't wait around for the engagement to begin from across the table. They often use data to force engagement, with great success. (I am thinking here of a client of ours who realized that her firm's clients were deeply interested in an emerging topic around which the firm was building resources. She developed a direct campaign just to those clients, communicating that attorneys were available to answer questions around that topic. She forced the engagement; it lead to new work. And I am thinking also of Clinton Gary's proactive approach, mentioned earlier, of arming attorneys with the right questions in meaningful facetime with existing clients, based on reader data.)
The marketing and business development funnel doesn't end when someone once made aware of you eventually becomes a client. Now, your focus, and the meaning of your activities, shifts once more. Goals include: keeping your clients; earning more work from them; serving them with an excellence that turns them into loyal advocates, willing to sing your praises publicly.
Here, all questions lead from one:
And, as I mentioned above: are they reading about the matters for which we serve them, or something else? Which content do they return to again and again? Is this an opportunity for meaningful facetime? Are they sharing our work? All of these questions, and others, while mapped at the intersection of the marketing funnel and your content efforts, are the types of questions you are already asking (or should be): do our clients trust us? Are they happy with our work? Are they getting what they need from us?
The answers, like many others, are in your reader data. Bring your questions.
[For a checklist of just the questions mentioned in this post, click here.]
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Paul Ryplewski is VP of Client Service at JD Supra