Over the past few weeks, I've been exploring a three-part framework for answering one of the questions I hear most frequently from clients:
How is our content doing?
In Part One, I focused on how to evaluate the question Are we publishing enough? In Part Two, I focused on the meanings, nuances, opprtunities that arise from asking Are we reaching the right audience?
This last post in the series arrives at the question that, in many ways, gives meaning to the other two:
Is our content supporting business growth?
I want to be careful with this one because it is tempting to jump immediately to ROI: Did this article generate a new matter? Did that webinar produce a lead? Those are certainly good outcomes, home runs even. But they represent only some of the ways thought leadership can support the business of a law firm. A better place to start is by asking another question:
How does our business grow?
If you can answer that with some specificity — for the firm, a practice group, or an individual attorney — you can begin to make much smarter decisions about what to publish, whom you need to reach, how frequently you need to show up, and, importantly, what success should look like. These are all of the elements of a meaningful content audit and the subsequent editorial calendar that arises from it. So, put another way:
1. Start with the business, not the content
Imagine an attorney tells you that the most reliable source of new business for her practice is speaking at industry conferences. When she gets in front of the right audience, good things happen. She meets potential clients and referral sources. Existing relationships deepen. People hear her expertise firsthand. Conversations begin in hallways, at the edge of the presentation stage, or during networking events that sometimes (or oftentimes) become business.
Now we have something useful. One key goal of her thought leadership isn't simply to get more reads, it's to earn more opportunities to speak in front of the audiences that matter to her practice.
That changes the content strategy, and the internal conversation about it:
What conferences does she want to speak at? Who organizes them? What issues/topics are appearing on their agendas? What questions are emerging in that industry? Does her published work demonstrate that she has something timely, distinctive, and useful to say about those issues? Does her thought leadership suggest she'd be a perfect panelist for the next industry conference?
These questions – or similar ones based on the business reality of your firm, practice group, or individual attorney – establish a measurable baseline for your audit:
How many speaking invitations did she receive last year as a result of her thought leadership or expertise? How many would represent meaningful progress this year?
Write those numbers down. This is the beginning of your editorial calendar, informed by data.
And now, when you meet quarterly to review the impact of your attorney's thought leadership, you have something far more useful to discuss than view count. For example:
Last quarter, your writing contributed to three speaking invitations. This quarter, we haven't seen any. What changed?
Did the topics change? Are they still aligned with what relevant conferences are programming? Has the marketplace moved on to a different set of questions? Are other voices becoming more prominent? Have we stopped putting the attorney's work in front of the people who organize these events? Is there an upcoming conference we should deliberately write toward?
Or, conversely:
We're getting more invitations. What appears to be working?
Such questions mean you are working in tandem, investigating next steps together. Your collaboration is framed by a shared sense of where you should be headed. That's what a useful content audit should make possible.
2. Different businesses require different definitions of success
Of course, speaking invitations may have nothing to do with how another attorney's practice grows. Consider a firm launching a new Data Centers practice.
The immediate business objective may be visibility: We want the market to understand that we have serious capabilities in this space.
In that case, some of the broad measures I've mentioned throughout this series become particularly meaningful. Are we publishing consistently enough to establish a presence? Is readership growing? Are we reaching people in the industries that develop, finance, build, operate, supply, and use data centers? Are relevant media and industry voices finding the work?
Then again, a mature, established practice serving a defined list of major companies might have a completely different objective.
Its content program might be designed to deepen existing relationships or create cross-selling opportunities. Success could mean discovering that clients who know the firm for one service are regularly reading its thought leadership about another. The useful next step isn't necessarily another article; it may be putting that information in the hands of a relationship partner so that the next client conversation is better informed.
For another lawyer, referrals may be the engine of growth. The content strategy should then account for the people who make those referrals. One ERISA attorney we've profiled, Ary Rosenbaum, built his content strategy in part around giving advisors and other referral sources useful material they could share with their own clients. In other words, Ary's audience strategy followed directly from his business model.
And sometimes a strong piece of written thought leadership reveals demand for another format altogether. We've seen firms turn unusually successful articles into webinars, using the original readership as evidence that the market wants more on the subject.
Different practices. Different routes to growth. Different content strategies.
That's why asking whether your firm's content program has good ROI can sometimes be too broad to be useful. Instead, start by asking:
What business behavior are we trying to support here and is our content helping?
3. Sometimes extraordinary traffic is the wrong result
During the early days of COVID, one firm published an article addressing who qualified as an essential worker while businesses were being shut down. As to be expected, the article exploded.
It generated extraordinary traffic in a matter of days, more readership than most legal thought leadership will see over its entire lifecycle. It also generated the thing every content marketer wants: engagement. Questions. Comments. Lots of attention.
There was just one problem: the people reading it weren't people likely to hire the firm. The article was answering a question that enormous numbers of individuals urgently needed answered, but the resulting audience had little connection to the firm's actual business strategy.
Ultimately, at our suggestion, the firm took the piece down. I love this example because it forces us to separate two things that are very easy to conflate: successful content and successful content marketing.
The article was unquestionably successful at attracting attention. But attention wasn't the firm's business.
Law firms aren't media companies monetizing page views by selling inexpensive advertising against enormous traffic. They publish to build visibility, demonstrate expertise, deepen relationships, reach prospective clients and referral sources, support business development, and ultimately help grow the firm.
A runaway article reaching the wrong audience can therefore be less valuable than a modestly read piece reaching exactly the people the practice needs to know.
That's not an argument against broad readership. Far from it. Broad visibility can be enormously valuable when visibility serves the business objective.
It's an argument for knowing why you wanted the readership in the first place. This is where the three parts of our audit series finally become one exercise.
Bringing It All Home
Suppose your firm has identified an emerging regulatory issue as an important growth opportunity.
Part One asks:
Are we publishing enough?
If the issue is changing rapidly and the firm wants to establish recognized expertise, perhaps you need a steady drumbeat of timely, useful analysis rather than an occasional comprehensive article.
Part Two asks:
Are the right people reading us?
Are you reaching the companies, industries, executives, in-house counsel, referral sources, media, or other audiences that matter to this opportunity? Are unexpected audiences appearing that deserve investigation?
Part Three asks:
Is any of this supporting what the business is trying to accomplish?
Perhaps the goal is to build a new practice. Perhaps it's to open doors within ten target companies. Perhaps it's to deepen relationships with existing clients. Perhaps it's to establish an attorney as the person conference organizers and reporters call when this issue comes up.
Once you know that, quantity and audience stop being isolated metrics. Instead, they become evidence with which you can now make decisions.
Give your analytics a job
One of the most useful things a marketer or BD professional can do before opening an analytics dashboard is to decide what question the data is supposed to help answer.
If the goal is launching a new practice, your analytics might need to tell you whether awareness and readership are growing among relevant industries.
If the goal is cross-selling, you might look for existing clients reading about capabilities they don't currently count on from your firm.
If the goal is developing a target account, company-level readership becomes particularly interesting: what issues are earning attention inside that organization, and how does that intelligence inform the relationship or pitch team?
If the goal is building an individual lawyer's profile, you might look at repeat readership, followers, media attention, invitations to speak, inbound questions, or other signs that recognition is growing among the people who matter.
If the goal is strengthening referral relationships, you might ask whether the content is useful and shareable for the people who send business your way.
Notice that the metric changes because the business question changes, which is why I don't recommend beginning an audit by asking, Which numbers went up? Begin by asking:
What were we trying to make happen?
Then use your data to understand whether it happened and what to do next.
Make the audit a conversation, not a report card
I think this may be the most important point in the entire series.
A good content audit should not end with marketing handing an attorney a spreadsheet of results. Instead, it should create a better conversation between the people who understand the data and the people who understand the practice.
Marketing knows what was published, what earned attention, who read it, and how those patterns have changed.
BD knows the firm's priorities, target accounts, client relationships, pipeline, and opportunities.
The attorney knows what clients are asking, which issues are becoming more urgent, what competitors are doing, where business actually comes from, and where she wants her practice to go.
Put those perspectives together.
Maybe readership is falling because you've stopped writing about the subjects your market cares about.
Maybe readership is growing, but in an industry the practice hadn't considered.
Maybe you're reaching exactly the right companies, but the writing isn't producing the speaking invitations, client conversations, referrals, or other outcomes you expected.
Maybe the business itself has changed and the content strategy simply hasn't caught up yet.
Those aren't bad audit results, they're useful findings. The purpose of a content audit isn't to prove that your content program is working. It's to learn enough to make the next version of it work better.
Three quick business-alignment audits you can conduct right now
1. Ask one attorney: “How does your practice grow?”
Don't begin with content. Ask where that attorney's best work comes from. Conferences? Referrals? Existing clients? A particular industry? A handful of target companies? Media visibility? Professional associations?
Then ask what thought leadership could realistically do to support that route to business.
Choose one outcome you can observe and establish a baseline. If speaking matters, count speaking invitations. If referrals matter, identify the referral audience. If cross-selling matters, identify the clients and services involved.
Give the content a job.
2. Take your three most successful pieces and redefine “successful”
Choose three publications that performed especially well over the past year and ask why you consider them successful.
High readership? Excellent. Now bring the other parts of the audit to bear.
Who read them? Did that audience matter to the practice? What happened because of the attention? Did an author receive an invitation to speak? Did a client share the article? Did a prospect engage? Did the piece generate a webinar, media inquiry, client conversation, referral, or follow-up publication?
You don't need every article to produce a new matter. You do need to understand whether the attention you're earning has some relationship to the reason you're publishing.
3. Put one business objective beside your JD Supra data
Choose an actual priority for the coming year: grow visibility in an industry, support a new practice, deepen relationships with existing clients, develop a target company, establish an attorney around an emerging subject.
Then look at your JD Supra analytics through that specific lens.
Which content is helping? Which authors are finding the audience? Which industries and companies are engaging? Where are you gaining traction? Where is the data telling you to reconsider your approach?
Write down what you learn and, most importantly, decide what changes as a result.
Publish more. Publish less. Change the subject. Narrow the audience. Bring in another author. Write toward an upcoming conference. Turn a successful article into a webinar. Share a reader signal with a relationship partner.
Then come back next quarter and ask the question again.
The point of an audit is what happens next
Across these three posts, I've asked you to look at three dimensions of your thought leadership. None of these questions has a universal answer. That's what makes them useful.
Your answers depend on your practice, your market, your clients, your ambitions, and what is happening around you right now.
And they'll change.
That's why I don't think of a content audit as something you conduct once, produce a report about, and put away.
It's a regular conversation between your business strategy, your market, your attorneys, your readers, and the evidence your content produces.
Keep asking the questions. Then let the answers tell you what to do next.
+
Paul Ryplewski is JD Supra’s VP of Client Services.