Three Content Marketing Rules You Should Break—and One You Can’t
This is an updated version of an article originally printed April 21, 2021, in The Legal Intelligencer here.
True confession: I’m often—OK, almost always—late with my columns, blogs and LinkedIn posts. Usually it’s lack of time. Client work comes first; writing and marketing for my own benefit falls to the bottom of the to-do list. (I know many of you can understand!) Sometimes it’s the challenge of finding a relevant topic to share.
I was late (as usual) with this blog, but not because I couldn’t find a topic. In fact, this issue presents itself over and over again in my work with clients.
The theme for this week is rules, why they matter and when you can—and should—break them.
Earlier this week I worked with a lawyer on a firm-branded alert covering regulatory developments in a particular financial market sector that’s in the headlines right now. The copy was both informative and brimming with wit and humor around what the lawyer saw as regulators getting (perhaps unnecessarily) hot under the collar. I thought the piece was great and told her so. She promised the final draft by the end of the day, after the head of her department reviewed it. But when I received the final version a couple of hours later, all of the humor was gone—as was any hint of insight and opinion from the previous draft. All that was left was a straight, lawyerly reporting of the facts.
Was it informative? Sure.
But it wasn’t thought-provoking and it lacked any real value-add for readers.
When asked why she changed the content, she said she didn’t think her original draft had been “appropriate” for a firm alert. Three days later a well-known media outlet published an article that included many of the same conclusions the lawyer had drawn in her first draft—and it was not nearly as entertaining.
Contrast that with another firm-branded piece I worked on this week. The employment lawyer wanted to develop content that was different from the typical alert providing a prescriptive analysis of the current state of post-pandemic workplace safety laws and regulations. He wanted to address the wide range of questions employers might have, and he wanted the language and tone to be more casual and practical, and less legal. We styled it as FAQs and wrote it in a very conversational tone, while also providing links to federal, state, and local resources. The client response has been enthusiastic, and it performed extremely well according to the analytics we track.
These are but two examples I saw of how rules—whether real or perceived—play into marketing communications. Some others included a mid-level associate who didn’t want to say anything in his bio that made him stand out from the rest of his firm colleagues, another associate who discarded a number of good topics for an article because he didn’t want to risk “going out on a limb” and writing on legal developments that are still unfolding, and a partner who didn’t want to make the language in a client alert more accessible and less full of jargon, because “our clients expect us to use these terms.” In all of these cases, the unwillingness to consider a different approach resulted in a lost opportunity to communicate with clients and prospects in a way that would distinguish the lawyer and the firm from competitors in a very crowded and noisy market.
I’m not saying I don’t like rules. In fact, my clients (and my kids) would tell you that I love a good grammar rule and that I live and die by the Associated Press Style Guide. In content-based marketing, especially in firm-branded pieces, as well as in professional bios and practice descriptions, a solid template, a style guide and a set of best practices ensures consistency in firm brand messaging across the website and in social media. A firmwide communications policy is essential for protecting the firm and its lawyers from ethical and legal snafus related to both thought leadership and interviews in media outlets that are not firm-controlled.
That said, some rules are meant to be stretched, bent or (maybe) even outright broken. And some aren’t. So how do you know? Well, it’s an art not a science, but here are some guidelines (not rules!) to consider.
Pennsylvania Rules of Professional Conduct. Should you bend or break them? Nope.
It often comes as a surprise to lots of my clients that more than just the rules around attorney advertising apply to thought leadership and marketing communications. The rules governing client confidentiality, conflict of interest, client communications, duties to former clients, and diligence and the duty of competence—including technological competence that covers social media platforms—all impact on marketing content and communications. Because all of these rules should be taken with the utmost seriousness, I recommend a well-thought-out communications policy that covers everything from firm-branded content, thought leadership and media interviews, to firm and individual social media. I also recommend well-articulated—and enforced— processes by which attorneys can vet media and thought leadership opportunities, and against which marketing content of all kinds can be reviewed, not just for issues covered by the Rules of Professional Conduct, but also for potential client- and business-related issues.
The Rules of Professional Conduct also dictate what you can (and can’t) put in bios and website content. The interpretation and application of the rules continue to change with time and technological innovation (AI is a hot topic these days), so staying in the know about the rules is important.
Social media platform guidelines. Should you bend or break them? Depends.
With social media, there are technological limitations and terms of service that impact the content you can post. For example, word or character limitations are immutable—if your post is too long, it will be cut off. There are best practices that will impact how your posts are displayed to others and how visible and popular your posts will be. For example, if the title of your post is too long, it will be truncated—and you might get fewer views because of that—but that’s less of a problem than a post that’s cut off in the middle. Posts with images tend to get more looks and more likes. And social media is a conversation, not a one- way advertising channel, so commenting, reposting and sharing are also part of a robust social media presence. It pays to be familiar with the different rules, guidelines and best practices, so that you make the most of your time and effort. That said, the social media landscape is constantly changing (hello, Twitter – I mean X), and sometimes just getting on a platform, however imperfectly, and learning as you go is worth the effort.
Grammar and style rules. Should you bend or break them? No—and yes.
Good communicating requires adherence to certain fundamentals: good grammar and attention to spelling; clarity of subject, language and purpose; purposeful organization; consistent style. Deviating from these basic guidelines is to risk being seen as sloppy and less than intelligent—neither one of which is good marketing take-aways for you or your firm. But within these general best practices, there is a lot of room for creativity and differentiation from competitors— which is the essential reason for marketing content. The employment piece is a great example of how a more conversational Q&A format, which might not 100% adhere to formal grammar rules, can still be informative and effective—and stand out from the sea of other content on the same subject. That content did not deviate from the style guidelines and best practices to which all of the firm’s content adheres. It was formatted using a template that the firm uses across its website and branding consistent with other employment law alerts.
SEO “rules.” Should you bend or break them? Absolutely, if it benefits you.
At its most basic, SEO or search engine optimization, is a process aimed at increasing the visibility of content on websites, and other owned channels like blogs, by focusing on where that content ranks in results on search engines like Google and Bing. The aim is to drive internet traffic to those digital pages on the theory that more website or blog traffic will translate into more clients.
“Organic” (or nonpaid) search results are the holy grail of SEO, and how your content “ranks” involves algorithms (that change constantly), keywords, tags and many other factors. It’s hard to say that there are true rules to SEO, in part because of the constant tweaks that search engines implement on a near-daily basis. There are techniques, strategies and best practices, and companies and consultants that focus entirely on optimizing those results.
In my opinion, content should be written for the readers you want to reach and inform, and not to the constantly changing search engines. Well-conceived and well-written content will rank well in searches because it’s written for the people who are looking for it, without having to stuff it with keywords. In fact, both Google and Bing recommend that websites focus on clear, unique, engaging and easy-to-find content aimed at people not search engines.
Recently an alert I helped develop with another New York-based employment lawyer “blew the doors off” the analytics, generating outstanding organic search results. How did we do it? By creating a piece that contained sought-after information for New York employers, all in one place, and with helpful links to useful resources, both the firm’s and others.
Did we consider the optimum length of the title and make sure the most important elements were in the first 70 characters, since that’s about how much real estate you have before titles get truncated in search results? Yes. Did we write the content to include the more than 100 keywords that readers were apparently using to get to this piece? Nope. We didn’t think about keywords at all. We thought about well-written, useful, value-added content for our clients.
And sometimes we deliberately “break” the rules like the title-length rule—because a shorter title sounds incomplete, forced or frankly stupid, or because we realize that key concepts that most of our readers would be searching for need to be in the title, even if it makes for a much longer one.
There are as many quotes about rules as there are rules to adhere to—or ignore. Pablo Picasso reportedly said: “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” The Dali Lama apparently advised: “Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively.” The author John Green seemed to be speaking directly to lawyers, who love to capitalize with abandon, when he wrote in his novel Paper Towns: “The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence.”
And then there is this rule, allegedly made “famous” by a man named Roger H. Lincoln: “There are two rules for success: 1. Never tell everything you know.”
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