Click Twice if You’ve Heard This One Before

(Place pacifier in baby data's mouth if it screams)

 

For anyone even peripherally involved in Marketing in 2014, this headline is an eye-catcher:  “We Have No Idea if Online Ads Work.” It starts the way every single published article must now start – with an anecdote. This one is pretty funny. A CBS executive is fearful, in 2003, that Google offering companies data on which ads work and which ads do not work will ruin the magic. The article goes on, the way every single published article must now go on, with data. This time the data is about data which makes the article twice as sexy. There was a study. Some people were going to buy some thing regardless so online ads may or may not be effective.

It’s not that interesting of a study or an article, even to a marketer. The main takeaway of the article is that it is not presented in an easy to read, single-page format. Instead you have to click on a button to go to the second page of the article.

That seems pretty benign. Why would that ever be a main takeaway? It’s an utterly forgettable action on behalf of the reader. Because clicking on to the second page is only there so that Slate.com can show you more ads. And here I thought David Foster Wallace laid irony to rest for good in 1996.

The best content in the article is the quote in the finale from one of the study’s co-authors:

“If you were comfortable for the past 100 years, if you were comfortable pissing in the wind and hoping it goes in the right direction, don’t kid yourself now by looking at this data.”

Let’s jog right past the juicy part to arrive at the point – don’t bother with the data. For companies selling goods on the internet this is, quite obviously, absurd. Listening to what your customers want and spotting trends before your competitors is too reductive to even be considered Marketing 101.

But what about legal marketing? Specifically, what about legal marketing for mid-sized firms and smaller? In other words, can we please make this about me?

I took the free Google Analytics classes. I read a book on data. In other words, you are enjoying the thoughts of an expert. And this expert agrees, in part, that you should not bother with the data. (I’m sorry, I realize nuance makes poor copy, stay with me here and we’ll land eventually. There is some bad weather here on the ground so we’re just going to circle the runway a few more times).

Oh, not because marketers are not savvy enough to detect causation and correlation, as the article suggests. This would be about as helpful as telling an attorney that the legal issue s/he is arguing is tricky so s/he shouldn’t bother. Yes, it is hard to determine where to allocate money and resources when marketing a service. Presumably that’s one of the reasons we receive a paycheck for our services.

Don’t bother with the data (in part) because the sample size is too small. This is not big data. This is little baby data. It can’t walk, talk or even roll over. It just sits there looking adorable all the damn time. Example: You run your web analytics report for April and notice that 200 more unique visitors went to your law firm’s website that month than average. To me, bothering with the data would mean drilling down even further and parsing out exactly where this surge of visitors came from, where they specifically went and how long they stayed.

To what end? Why? Are you going to change your strategy based on 200 unique visitors to your law firm website? If the answer is yes then, by all means, drill down that data! But the answer probably shouldn’t be yes. Maybe if you were blessed with unlimited staff resources and time it might be novel to spend a little bit on projects like this, but you’re not. Is this really the best use of your time?

Lead with a question that data may be able to be one piece of evidence in figuring out an answer. Say, for instance, you want to know how effective a partner’s recent publishing tear has been. Some baby data on profile visits, article shares and the like can be one helpful piece of evidence.

But be careful.

Recently I heard, twelfth-hand, of a firm that scrapped practice group pages entirely because no one was visiting them, or, more accurately, less people were visiting them than they found acceptable. Did they lead with a question or did they look at data blindly and allow the data to tell them what should be done? There may be a very great strategic reason to abandon practice group pages. Plenty of firms are doing it and/or getting more creative with how they present their myriad of services.

But right now a client is on your webpage. Your client has used you and your firm to handle their real estate closings. The client is on your webpage because s/he is bored at work and wants to know what the new associate that was so nice over the phone looks like. As s/he is clicking around to their ultimate destination, they see that your firm handles Premises Liability. And for 0.2 seconds, the client registers this in his/her head, “I didn’t know that.” They don’t click on the page because your client is pretty sure what “Premises” and “Liability” means and is brilliant enough to, when combining the two words, ascertain meaning.

Since they don’t click, baby data doesn’t know. Baby data doesn’t talk, remember? The data goo goo ga ga’s that practice group pages are worthless.

Or, maybe you’re lucky. Maybe your firm’s data isn’t baby data at all. It’s all grown up and even has its own apartment. And it’s telling you, “Ads don’t work.”

Somewhere a smart marketer listens to that big, bad data and responds: “We Have No Idea if Online Ads Work. Click here, and then click again to the second page to find out why.”

Thoughts on Outsourcing Content Marketing

 

(Note: I wrote this article myself, using my own opinions. All mistakes and logical fallacies are my own)

Content marketing has moved beyond buzz-word, passed Hot Seminar Topic, driven right by Panel Discussion & firmly landed as an industry. I’ve read dozens of articles about content marketing the past few weeks that are, in fact, themselves, content marketing. Articles that explain how many ‘touches’ of content marketing you need in order to solidify a sell (it’s 12, apparently. It used to be 10, but now it is positively 12). Articles that define content marketing (it’s a tricky concept but, essentially, you use content to market). And, increasingly, I see a suggestion in content marketing articles about content marketing that the “development” (writing) can be, and maybe even should be, outsourced.

Here’s how I picture this:

                John, Attorney: I need to content market. Can you assist me?

Steve, Content Marketer: Yes, we have experts in many different fields. What would you like to market?

                John, Attorney: I want clients and prospects to know that I am an expert on immigration law.

Steve, Content Marketer: Great! We can do that. We have a research team that can put together the content for your final review.

                John, Attorney: Oh, also, I want to seem approachable. Likeable, even, if that’s possible.

Steve, Content Marketer: That’s not a problem at all. We provide a high level of service to our clients, and we also strive to put a personal touch on all of our content.

So my imaginary scenario is glib and, most likely, disrespectful to outsourced content marketers. I apologize. Let me go ahead and lay out my specific issues with outsourcing the creation of content.

1.      YOU are supposed to be the expert

2.      People want to get to know, and hire, YOU

3.      “Research team” is fancy speak for “Google,” which a lot of people have access to already

You create content to show off your expertise in a particular niche. So, show it off. Did you become an expert by googling terms related to your field, printing out academic articles you find and then piecing them together into a coherent article? No? You didn’t? You became an expert by handling dozens of cases, spanning a variety of issues and touching on many disparate facets of the law?

Many content marketers interview the individual purporting to write the content and then put together an article or articles based on those interviews with the ‘writer’ always having final approval. That’s better, absolutely. But now you are paying someone to dictate, convert your verbal responses to a writing style and add clauses. I want to suggest that the biggest missed opportunity with this approach is the time you would have spent thinking about what you were going to write. Writing is difficult, without a doubt. But sometimes, the most difficult part of it is staring at a blank screen. It can also be the most illuminating part. Think of this way: most professionals spend a majority of their working time actively engaged in tasks. How much time do professionals spend on introspection? Or, for that matter, retrospection on the work you have done? That’s very valuable for you and your clients. Your clients want to know what you do, what you have done and what you know. No interview or research team can encapsulate that. Only you can, and only over time. You will not find your voice immediately, but the process of you finding your voice is actually pretty interesting, as a reader, to watch unfold. There’s no confusion about who is behind the thoughts and opinions, because it’s not carefully crafted and sanitized.

Let’s zoom way out. Why do you want to participate in content marketing? If the only reason is because you heard that Google’s search algorithms reward original content then I submit that’s a bad reason. You can absolutely feel fine outsourcing your content if that’s your reason, but it’s a wasted opportunity. If you are interested in content marketing it should be about something else – about turning your experiences and expertise into something of value for other people.

Think about your audience. Isn’t that the first rule they teach when writing anything? If your audience can find this same exact information in a 0.0004 second google search: what value are you adding?

Think about your audience. If your audience will come away from reading your content with nothing more than “s/he practices immigration law,” you probably could have saved some time and money writing that in your various bios + linkedin profile.

Think about your audience. If your audience will come away from reading your content with a sense of who you are as a professional, what you do and what you know then they will come again to learn more and they will be much more likely to pay to utilize your knowledge and experience because you have added value and, more than that, you have presented yourself. You did not hide yourself or wall yourself in canned industry-speak. That stuff gets read right over when it does get read. Be interesting. Be you.

You can’t outsource you. You can outsource elements of content marketing, of course. The design, the functionality, the delivery system. But you cannot outsource the critical piece that makes content marketing, when done well, so effective: the feeling of connection between the reader and the writer.

Sometime soon I’ll write a quick post on where to spin that monkey mind of yours as you stare at the blank screen. I don’t have much experience or any expertise, but that is a place I know very well.

What a Major League Baseball Team can teach us about Legal Marketing

Joe Posnanski is a very good sportswriter. When it comes to baseball, he may be the best in the business right now. He recently wrote an article on “The Oakland Way,” examining the Oakland A’s continued success more than a decade after Moneyball was written by Michael Lewis. It is a very good article and I recommend you read the entire thing, but, for my purposes, here’s your summary:

The Oakland A’s do not have a lot of money to spend on baseball players, the way teams like the Red Sox and Yankees do. Michael Lewis wrote Moneyball, which then became a successful movie, profiling their General Manager, Billy Beane, and the approach the Oakland A’s took in identifying talent and finding success with less resources than other teams. The book has been a lightning rod since its publication for a myriad of reasons that are mostly too boring to get into. Basically, many took it as some sort of hagiography of Billy Beane and misinterpreted the message. The book is about exploiting inefficiencies. Michael Lewis made his bones writing about markets, and still does, and in this baseball story he found some interesting marketing inefficiencies that the Oakland A’s were exploiting. Now, it’s over a decade later and those inefficiencies are no longer inefficient. They are known by all teams, fans, writers and even the players themselves. And the Oakland A’s keep winning with resources that suggest they shouldn’t. That is because, in a nutshell, there is a new inefficiency, and that inefficiency is execution.

One of the key quotes that immediately clues us in that this is “not just a baseball story,” comes from the Oakland A’s current Director of Baseball Operations, Farhan Zaidi, “We’re not trying to be smarter than anybody else. We’re just trying to stay true to our philosophy of building a baseball team.”

The lesson within the article is actually relevant to any organization or business, but since my particular interest is legal marketing, I’ll focus on that. I receive, like many marketers, a barrage of daily industry information in the form of articles, books, white papers, webinars, podcasts and every other medium designed to deliver a message. The duplicative content of much of this onslaught is exhausting. Content marketing is king. There is a new normal. Add video. Stay engaged. Automate. Pine for and mine big data.

As a sample, here are three headlines for content sent to me before Noon on Wednesday June 5^th, 2014:

o   How Does Business Intelligence Improve Your Bottom Line?

o   How CMOs and CIOs are working to improve business with technology

o   Marketer's Guide to Mobile Engagement 2014

I don’t have an opinion either way on the content of these articles (or presentations or 3-D virtual reality seminars, whatever they may be). I don’t have a problem with any of the headlines. I can’t write headlines, mine are no better. What strikes me as I look at the plethora of knowledge in my industry is how transparent and ubiquitous the playbook is.

Folks who do not work at law firms and have very little experience with firms as a business typically start a conversation with, “How do you market a law firm?” But within the industry, the answer to that question is known across the board.  Being a bit of a contrarian by nature, I’m always looking for some new angle or some popular technique to dislike or rail against. But, the Oakland A’s story gets straight to the point – there is no new angle.

Let’s get back to the story. The meat of it, the point of this post in one quote from the story, comes from Posnanski summing up the secret to the Oakland A’s success:

No, it's not about KNOWING things others don't. It's about ACTING differently from other teams.

Acting differently comes down to execution. For the Oakland A’s they cannot afford to get seduced by a hard-throwing left-handed pitcher who, if they could just teach him to throw strikes would be a superstar. It doesn’t matter that other teams do this. In legal marketing, we cannot afford to have some portion of the team operating outside the organizational philosophy. It does not matter if there are office politics at stake. The Oakland A’s cannot afford to ignore a 27 year old minor league hitter that is tearing the cover off the ball just because he is too old. If he can hit, he can hit. Why he didn’t hit in the past is not of any concern to them because they are playing baseball in the present. Legal marketers cannot afford to take half measures and shortcuts or use short-term minor successes as evidence that the long term vision is flexible. I mean, yes, be adaptable. But don’t abandon principle.

Strategy is fun and intellectually stimulating to discuss and craft. I love strategy. Spending an inordinate amount of time strategizing is a great way to sound fantastic at meetings and not further the firm’s goals. The real work, the work that pays off and shows up, is painstaking. It is filled with details that cannot be overlooked or tossed aside. Strategy is big and broad. Execution is a daily process. It is tiny. It is necessarily stubborn and slow. It is extremely tempting to look at the competition, see something new and exciting, and take off in an entirely new direction. The Oakland A’s choose not to do that. They know the playbook, it’s the same playbook every other General Manager in baseball has, and they focus on execution and ignoring the temptations to stray. And there are many temptations.

The marketer down the street is just as smart as you. The attorneys down the street are just as smart as your attorneys. The market inefficiency is not intelligence or skill. It’s execution.