How I accidentally fell in love with content marketing

In July of 2011, I published the first edition of Advertising Law News and Analysis. I wish I could say I had a unique vision to fill a void in legal thought leadership, but the opposite is true. That summer, it seemed like every firm in the advertising bar launched an email newsletter. The Chair of our practice decided we were being left behind. We needed to get in the game, and he tasked me with launching our newsletter. In 2011, content marketing wasn’t a hot buzzword, but it was exactly what we were trying to figure out as we churned out newsletter after newsletter.

Four years later, the landscape has changed considerably. All the competing publications, save one, have fallen out of print. Colleagues, clients and competitors have called our newsletter the best in the industry. And everyone, even some legal marketers, are talking about content marketing.

As I sat in my office last week deciding what to include in our fourth anniversary edition, my thoughts turned to the lessons I have learned over the past four years. Here are the top 10:

1) You have eight seconds, maybe

A study released last year noted that adult humans now have shorter attention spans than your average Goldfish. When it comes to an email newsletter, that means you have maybe eight seconds to engage your reader. But you can stretch that with a strong lede and a short, conversational and to the point style that will resonate with busy readers.

I based our newsletter on The Week, a great digest that paraphrases a variety of sources to provide a concise but nuanced summary of world events. For the first year or so, my summary text for a story would run three or four paragraphs. That was way too long. Now the summary text is no more than two paragraphs, and I always shoot for one paragraph.

2) Process builds success

I am not naturally a process-first person so it took a while to accept that process is the key to repeatability and success. The end goal is to land in the reader’s inbox at roughly the same time each Thursday afternoon. We want the newsletter to become a part of their Thursday afternoon, or Friday morning, schedule each week. To accomplish that goal, we’ve built a workflow that enables everyone across the firm involved in production to know when the newsletter will arrive on their desks and where it needs to go next. An unexpected benefit of building and following our process has been that the few times we have needed to deviate from the plan, we have been able to do so without throwing the newsletter’s production into complete disarray.

3) Content has to be good, but it doesn’t have to be a masterpiece

When we first started the newsletter, I agonized over the copy. I wanted to write about advertising law-related news that clients would not have seen anywhere else, and my constant wordsmithing of the copy to get it “just right” slowed the production process to a crawl. After several months of driving myself – and everyone involved – crazy, I learned an important lesson: readers want quick, actionable insights. Partners want interested readers to call, and pay, for more detailed advice. No one, except for me, was looking for a literary masterpiece. Don’t worry so much about making your prose sing. Just focus on writing good copy with strong hooks.

4) Link to primary sources

One of the things that sets our newsletter apart from others is that after the teaser copy and the link to the original piece, I will include links to relevant primary sources. Those links can be a court decision, a Federal Trade Commission complaint or consent order, a news story, Executive Order or material published in the Federal Register. Although the majority of our readers don’t click through to the primary sources, including the links builds authority and puts the information at the fingertips of those who want to learn more about the specific issue.

5) No one cares about your newsletter like you do, and that’s okay

Our newsletter, and Venable’s advertising law blog, All About Advertising Law, are still in business because come hell or high water one person is going to make sure the content is written, vetted, and published. Publishing for a partnership like a law firm is an inherently collaborative process. But the Internet is littered with the bones of legal newsletters and blogs launched with the best of intentions then published by committee.

If your firm or business launches a newsletter, or a blog, someone has to own it, and they have to want to own it. Actually, they have to love it. Without that love, the publication will eventually die slowly of neglect, buried under every other thing on that partner / associate / legal marketer’s desk.

6) Don’t be afraid to repurpose content

This is something of a riff on number three, but that fact is almost all firms produce great content. The vast majority of that content focuses on a single area of practice and distributed solely to the clients of that practice group. It takes a lot of time to create content, so it only makes sense to maximize that time by reaching the broadest possible audience. That’s where repurposing comes in.

I learned the art of repurposing from the head of Venable’s nonprofit practice. He is a prolific writer, but also a keen reader of client alerts and advisories published by other Venable attorneys. If the firm’s employment lawyers publish “What Companies Need to Know About Changing Overtime Rules,” he will send the alert to his clients titled “What Nonprofits Need to Know about Changing Overtime Rules.” Since launching our newsletter, we have republished dozens of stories – ranging from legal issues when an employee has been exposed to Ebola, to rules of thumb for outsourcing agreements – that were originally published by other practice groups within our firm but also had business value to our readership.

7) Promote your friends and colleagues

Our newsletter has three sections “News,” “Analysis,” and “Events.” While the Analysis section is by far the largest and filled only with Venable-produced content, the News and Events sections give us the opportunity to highlight content and events produced by groups with whom we are affiliated. Pieces in the Analysis and News sections always link back to the original publication, and our Events listing always link to the event site, session page and speaker bios. Everyone appreciates the new eyeballs and the high-authority inbound links help with SEO.

8) Don’t take your analytics personally

Analytics are incredibly valuable. They can tell you what your audience does, and does not, like and point the way to your best new business prospects. But analytics also sing a siren song. If you’ve taken ownership of a newsletter or blog, it can be tempting to view the opens, clicks and unsubscribes for each edition or post as a weekly referendum on your professional and personal worth. Don’t fall into this trap. In good times, it will make you high, and in bad times, it will lay you low. Either way, a preoccupation with analytics will become a massive time suck.

These days, I take a quick peek on Friday morning to see how the newsletter did overnight. Then on Monday afternoon, after all the engagement for the week has happened, I log the results for the week in my tracking spreadsheet, which helps me spot trends and understand the newsletter's performance.  

9) If people aren’t reading, you don’t need them on your list

Our first edition went to roughly 4,000 contacts of the attorneys in our practice group. A few months later, we acquired an opt-in email list from a broker and our send total jumped to 40,000. But, while we were still getting roughly the same number of opens, our unsubscribe rates went through the roof. I’m sure our SPAM complaints did too.

One day, our team was discussing email best practices and we decided to cull the herd. We removed from our email list anyone who had not opened an edition of the newsletter in the previous six months. That left us with a list half the size of the previous week. Unsubscribes went through the floor while opens, engagement, and, I’m sure, our sender reputation score went up. As an added bonus, our send time decreased significantly, freeing up our email marketing system for other users in the firm.

10) Reward loyalty

One great thing about email marketing analytics is the granular detail it provides. You can see who reads your content, what areas interest them and you can note who has unsubscribed. If you feel the urge to take unsubscribes personally – and there’s a good chance you will – reread tip seven. During the holiday break last winter, I was thinking about what to do with all that data. So, I compiled all of 2014’s data and personally called the 25 most frequent readers of the email newsletter who were not already clients. I thanked them for reading and offered to provide a free Continuing Legal Education (CLE) session for their in-house legal team or marketing department stakeholders. None of those interactions have generated business, yet. But they generated greater familiarity with our practice, significant good will, one invitation to submit a proposal, and valuable feedback about both the newsletter and the market perception of our practice.

Four years ago, “content marketing” wasn’t a hot buzzword. But it was exactly what our competitors and we were trying to do as we churned out newsletters in the summer of 2011. Sophisticated content marketing will become the new normal for law firms and other high-value professional services organizations.

The fact is that busy and increasingly sophisticated clients are demanding more from their outside counsel and repaying that with a greater willingness to switch firms. The perceived value of a firm’s or attorney’s legal counsel is the biggest factor in clients’ decisions to hire and retain a firm. That said, high-quality content marketing both softens up the beachhead with new prospects and maintains client mindshare for firms and attorneys.

To win at this game, attorneys, legal marketers – myself included - and the agencies servicing law firms will have to become much more like the sophisticated B2B marketers in other industry verticals. I don’t know whether I’ll be publishing Advertising Law News and Analysis four years from now, but I am excited to see how it, and the content it competes against, will evolve.