Perfect Timing: The Right Branded Content At The Right Time — For You And Your Clients
Last week was a “hair on fire” kind of content week for some of my clients and for me. My project list included finishing up bios for a client’s integration of more than 20 laterals and the opening of a new office; finalizing presentation materials for a three-hour workshop one client was giving and CLE materials for a conference where another was speaking; editing the articles for the next issue of a monthly, multi-article newsletter; and polishing a video script so the design team could get started on the graphics on schedule.
Midafternoon one day, another project dropped into my inbox: a client alert reporting on regulatory rulemaking just announced by a federal agency. The client was adamant that the alert be sent out by the end of the day, and emailed me and the rest of the team repeatedly asking for updates and requesting priority treatment from the proofers and marketing team members tasked with formatting and publishing the alert.
Why the rush treatment?
She wanted hers to be the first alert in clients’ inboxes.
I know some of you are nodding your heads and thinking: “Sure, that’s the goal, right?”
Here’s the reality: Being the first in your clients’ inbox with a new legal or industry development — whether it’s a court decision, newly enacted legislation or regulatory change — is nearly impossible to achieve.
Not only that, it shouldn’t be your goal.
I realize that what I’m saying contradicts the advice of a lot of other marketing professionals, but hear me out.
Your competition for first-in-the-inbox email is not only all the law and professional services firms putting out alerts, but also the general circulation and business media, and trade and industry publications, not to mention government and regulatory agencies that have their own outbound information systems. (The Federal Trade Commission, for example, not only issues press releases, but has blogs and sends emails too.) You might also be competing with information technology giants like Google that let users set keyword alerts that email information directly to their inboxes.
“Scooping the competition” is a bit of a relic from before today’s digital information age, when information sources were more limited and you could only get news from The Wall Street Journal once a day by buying it at the newsstand in the morning or having it delivered. In our 24/7 media environment, we — and our clients — experience a barrage of emails, texts and digital notifications all day long. Most clients are savvy information consumers; they have their trusted sources of reliable information. Your goal is to become one of those sources. But it’s unlikely that you will consistently beat a legal or business media source like The Legal Intelligencer or Law360 into your clients’ inboxes. The same sources you rely on for up-to-the-minute information are also available to your clients. By the time you send your alert out, the client most likely already knows about the development.
The best you can hope for in the first-in-the-inbox race is to publish before your law firm competitors do. Unless you have a team of content writers on standby and a very efficient content process in place, it’s not likely that you can consistently deliver alerts faster than everyone else.
More to the point, however, trying to be first in the inbox can actually undermine the real goals of your branded content: to engage with and build a trust relationship with your clients and prospects.
Haste Makes Waste.
The race to the inbox sometimes turns into a race to the bottom in terms of quality, which doesn’t help your marketing efforts or meet your clients’ need for useful information. Your writing might be great, but if the alert you’re rushing to get out the door merely reports the facts and doesn’t provide any new or actionable information, the quality of the content you’re providing is working against your thought leadership goals.
One of the main goals of publishing branded content (from a marketing and business development perspective) is to show clients that you’re on top of developments in your practice area. But, as many (many) studies and polls showed during and after the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, clients reacted very negatively to being inundated with “breaking news” alerts with the same information as every other news source.
You’re also wasting a fantastic opportunity to stand out from your competitors by providing your clients with what they really want: an analysis of the development tailored to their business, industry or personal perspective; your insights on how the development will impact them; and predictions about what might be on the horizon or suggestions of possible actions they might want to take.
Don’t Be The Lawyer Who Cries Wolf.
This is especially important when dealing with clients, but also with those folks who help you get your content out, including members of your marketing department (if you’re lucky enough to have one), or associates and paralegals who may be helping you research and write content.
I work with a sophisticated Trusts and Estates practice whose clients are high net worth individuals and families. The lawyers recognized that the risk with sending too many “breaking news” type emails is that in the sea of content in their inboxes, clients can miss the critical alerts that do require them to take some immediate action. To help clients distinguish between “must know” developments that require attention and “good to know” trends and other developments that might have longer lead times, the practice developed two different styles of alerts with two different kinds of branding, formatting and intro language.
These lawyers also think critically and deliberately about the alerts they publish. Rather than send multiple alerts on topics that are not “must know,” they issue a report for high net worth families — a newsletter with six or seven short articles on important but not time-sensitive developments — a few times a year. The analytics show that this publication is widely read not only by people who receive it by email, but also by readers who find it through internet searches.
From the perspective of a marketing professional, one situation my team and I find very stressful is the rush alert that isn’t a rush at all. Developments that require clients to take action immediately or know about a looming deadline should be prioritized, and client-impact alerts on these topics should be published as soon as possible. But, in my opinion, these kinds of developments are actually few and far between.
Be Worth The Wait.
This is my content mantra because the research shows that clients are willing to pass on reading (by which I mean hit that delete button on) other law firm alerts that come in first, once they know that your alerts deliver the information they need. Getting to that trusted-source position is not a “one and done” endeavor, however. You have to demonstrate that you take that relationship seriously, by reliably providing valuable, targeted and usable information.
Remember that the value you provide (and the value you’re trying to highlight) is your legal knowledge and expertise. Don’t simply summarize or report on the development that happened ― your clients can get the basic facts about court decisions, new legislation and other developments quickly and easily elsewhere. What they want is your take on what they should do with the news. At the most basic level, your clients are looking for straightforward, real-world advice to help them stay out of legal or reputational trouble, improve their bottom line, or do their job better. Give them this content regularly, and they’ll look past the other law firms’ emails and open yours.
Time It Right.
You might be thinking, “Wait a minute! I thought you said timing wasn’t the goal?” You’re right, I did. But I didn’t say to forget about timing your alerts altogether. When I talk to clients about branded content, I tell them that there is a “sweet spot” where information and timing meet. And, depending on the development, you may also have more than one good opportunity to get in front of your clients with timely and actionable information.
For example, let’s say your state enacts a new employment law that impacts employers’ workplace policies and procedures. In this scenario, the law was enacted this week but doesn’t go into effect for another year and, in the meantime, the state agency tasked with enforcing the law will be issuing implementing regulations. You, an employment lawyer, have at least three opportunities to get in front of your clients with information they need.
Rather than fire off an alert about the law being enacted (an alert that every other employment firm is scrambling to write), listen for the questions your clients are asking and write an alert addressing those. It does not need to be published today; sending it out within a week or so is fine. You’ll have another opportunity for an alert, this time on practical and compliance issues, when the agency releases the implementing regulations. And, if you missed either of the previous opportunities, you can issue an “are you ready for this law” alert as the effective date approaches.
I often hear: “Our clients expect us to publish an alert on this topic; it will look like we’re not paying attention if we don’t.”
My answer in that case is: “Then of course you should publish an alert.” Just make sure it’s not the same alert as every other law firm’s.
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