It’s time to advance our content marketing conversations beyond optimizing keywords and SEO results. It’s time to move beyond discussions that just explore half of the picture - content creation - and instead talk about the complete picture - content creation + target audience consumption. And it's past time that we called our work done simply by creating and publishing content instead of challenge ourselves to do better continuously and learning from what our readers are saying.
It’s time.
Let’s face it: if your firm is producing content that is not being read by your target audience, you are literally wasting time and money. In a law firm, producing substantive content frequently requires the use of attorney time that could otherwise be billed. That time comes at a very real cost to the firm. And after allowing for 
additional time spent editing, approving and posting, you are often into real money.
So how does it make financial sense to just post that content on a website, fine tune keywords and title tags, and sit back and wait for the right people to find it and read it? It’s a bit like the age-old philosophical question, “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” For us in content marketing, it’s: “If we post an article on a website and no one reads it, does it have any impact?”
[For the record, the officially accepted answer to the tree falling question (appearing in 1883 in The Chautauqua magazine, by the way) is: No - if no one is around to hear it, or if the sound cannot be isolated and heard, there is no sound.]
No person, no sound. No reader, no impact.
Implementing a strategy is not rocket science, but it does take thought, time and budget. Suffice to say that it starts with great content that’s a glove fit for your target audience. My colleagues at JD Supra have written several great posts here, here and here that dive into the details on how that’s done. I’d highly encourage anyone to read these before putting pen to paper.
You also need a plan to get your content in front of your target audience and accessible to them in their preferred delivery mechanism. As they say, it’s so 20 minutes ago to make everyone come to you. Smart brands are finding ways make their content ubiquitous and platform agnostic. This lets clients and prospective clients engage with your content according to their preferences, not yours. (One rallying cry of Content Marketing 2.0: “Meet your readers where they gather!”)
...this is a world in which today’s good content begets tomorrow’s better content.
It’s only after you’ve done these things that you are ready to enter into Content Marketing 2.0 - a world, as we at JD Supra see it, that is mapped by what we call the Virtuous Circle of Content Marketing.
We say Virtuous Circle because this is a world in which today’s good content begets tomorrow’s better content; a world in which your analytics have the power to improve your efforts. By mining your data, by listening to what your audience is telling you, you gain powerful insights that help you to refine editorial efforts and stay engaged with target readers. You spot trends, identify notable professionals engaging with your content, and even facilitate interaction with readers and your attorneys/business development team.
And all of this funnels back into your content creation process, giving you a leg up on your competitors as you implement what you’re learning on the front lines to create even more responsive content.
Cool stuff. And way more impactful than keywords and SEO results. We invite you to join the conversation. Please follow along and share your thoughts.
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