Content marketing has increasingly become a powerful tool for law firms of all sizes seeking to reach and engage their target audience. It goes beyond traditional advertising, static websites and social media tweets.

Effective content marketing consistently provides valuable insights, thought leadership and educational content, intentionally created for the executives, companies, industries and markets most relevant to your capabilities and strategy. This will help achieve your primary objectives which are to create additional opportunities and revenue by influencing perceptions and encouraging action.

To influence your target audience that you are trusted authorities, firms need their content to answer four questions:

• Do you understand my problem?
• Do you understand my business?
• Have you solved a problem like mine?
• You have solved it for a company like mine?

Given the nature of these questions, successful content marketing requires a strong foundation of experience management.

In this post, we'll explore why law firms need to manage their experience to enhance their content marketing efforts and what effective experience management looks like.

What is Experience Management?

“Experience,” for a professional services firm, is a brief description of value delivered to a client. This typically includes a description of the client, the issue, the approach, and the results delivered or outcome. This is two to six sentences in length. It can be aligned with a specific matter, but sometimes it takes an aggregate of matters (especially those involving multiple practices) to deliver value in the form of a service or solution for a client.

However, not all experiences are created equal. Most experience is beneficial to their firm in some capacity and therefore worthy of capturing. But, the more “marketable” experiences, which we want for content marketing, have something that demonstrates our firm’s higher-level expertise, service or prestige, such as engagements that are large, complex, innovative, precedent-setting, time-constrained or with a prominent company.

“Experience Management” is the harnessing and leveraging of a firm’s collective experience for more effective marketing and collaborative business development.

The art of experience management is uncovering and writing a short description that tells a compelling story. Firms of all sizes already do this in some form, albeit painfully, for legal rankings. The science of experience management is utilizing technology, classifications and standards so the experience description is captured and searchable based on its characteristics (i.e., related professionals, company name/industry/geography, client issue, service performed, “marketable,” etc.) and aggregated and extractable with similar records, as well as looking for trends across the growth and usage of a firm’s collective experience (i.e., first experiences captured related to an emerging VUCA/Board issue, significant volume of experience in a jurisdiction or type of transaction, an increase in the searches for a specific regulatory term, etc.)

...the spark for content marketing and the hammer in business development opportunities.

Professional services firms that excel in marketing and business development, especially the prominent consulting and accounting firms which have led the way and continually invest in experience management (aka, knowledge management), consider it a competitive advantage. Their experience management engine is the spark for content marketing and the hammer in business development opportunities.

You can see this in the standard format of marketing content for prominent consulting firms. It typically flows like this: define a timely or relevant issue, identify who is most affected and why they should act now, present new or innovative approach/solution, support with data and analysis, and confirm with experience. Each phase is supported by their experience management program.

It’s important to note that this does not have to be complex or expensive. Yes, many large and mid-size law firms invest in people and technology to automate, integrate, and enhance the process. However, for small to midsize law firms, this process can start as easily as 1-on-1 interviews and writing by designated lawyers supported by new purpose-built and affordable experience management technologies and outsourced data quality.

How Does Experience-led Content Marketing Help My Firm?

Credibility: Content marketing is about offering valuable insights and solutions to your audience's legal concerns. By managing their experience effectively, law firms can more easily create credible content, especially real-world case studies and success stories based on experience that demonstrates the firm's differentiating expertise and service in handling significant legal issues.

This is important because “stories” are considered a more powerful form of content for engagement and persuasion. For example, transaction attorneys love displaying deal tombstones. And yes, effective experience management can get you relevant tombstones. But it’s the stories behind them that are typically the next questions from prospective clients.

So, do you have the stories captured? Experience-based content builds trust and preference with the target audience to advance conversations and enhance your firm's position as a “must read” and “go to” firm.

Tailoring Content to Your Target Audience: A well-managed experience management program allows law firms to identify the most relevant and engaging content topics for their target audience. By understanding the types of legal matters and questions their clients commonly face, law firms can tailor their content to address those specific needs.

Whether it's through blog posts, articles, videos or infographics, delivering tailored content increases the chances of capturing the attention of potential clients who are seeking solutions to their specific legal problems. This approach is particularly influential because it is widely known that legal buyers start a search for a law firm by calling their counterparts within their industry. Content marketing can advance and direct that process with the use of experience-based, industry-specific content.

Develop Thought Leadership, Collaboratively: A higher form of content marketing is thought leadership. An overused and frequently misused word in legal marketing, a leader in the space of thought leadership and author of “Competing on Thought Leadership: How Great B2B Companies Turn Expertise into Revenue,” Bob Buday defines thought leadership as “the acclaim that a firm or a person earns for developing, marketing, and delivering superior expertise in solving complex customer problems.”

The emphasis here is on “developing.”

Where most content is an explanation of what has happened or a skim across the top of existing issues (and the growing use of ChatGPT to collect and rehash existing knowledge), an experience management program can help law firms look at their experience in aggregate to identify relevant experiences, bring together the related professionals for a collaborative discussion, and find the “what did we learn” and “what’s next” related to a client issue. Then, and most importantly, the firm can develop methodologies to sell and scale the delivery of an innovative service or solution for greater profitability.

This creates a powerful content marketing engine that promotes cross-silo collaboration and empowers marketing professionals with the content it needs to enhance the firm’s reputation as innovative and forward-looking, which are leading attributes in client feedback surveys of general counsels.

Conclusion

Effective content marketing is an essential component of any successful law firm's marketing and business development strategy and execution. However, to truly excel in content marketing, law firms must strategically manage their experience. By harnessing and leveraging their ever-growing collective experience to demonstrate credibility, tailor content to their target audience, and develop thought leadership, law firms can enhance reputations (and rankings), increase engagement, and encourage action in strategically important areas for their clients and the firm.

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Credo Consulting helps law firms maximize collaborative growth through collaboration strategies, disciplined business development, operational excellence and individual coaching. Credo is led by Clinton Gary, a former Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer for prominent law and Big 5 firms, and an Accredited Partner with Gardner & Co. on the methodologies of “Smarter Collaboration.” Recognized by The American Lawyer for “Best Law Firm Marketing” and innovations in industry and client teams, marketing planning and budgeting, and experience management, among other collaborative initiatives, Clinton can maximize your firm’s collective capabilities and talents for greater value to your clients, professionals and firm. For more information, contact Clinton at clinton@credocg.com and connect with him on LinkedIn.

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Stefanie Marrone advises law firms of all sizes, professional service firms, B2B companies, recruiters and individuals on the full range of marketing and business development consulting services designed to enhance revenue, retain current clients and achieve greater brand recognition. She also serves as outsourced chief marketing officer/marketing department for small and mid-size law firms.

Over her 20+-year legal marketing career, she has worked at and with a broad range of big law, mid-size and small firms, which has given her a valuable perspective of the legal industry. Connect with her on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, sign up for her email list and follow her latest writing on JD Supra.