...if you can’t take someone to lunch, what’s your back-up plan to nurture vital human relationships?

With nearly every professional in every line of work challenged with forecasting what each industry will look like in our new collective futures post-COVID-19, it’s only natural to look ahead to project what the future of legal marketing might be. Certainly, the near term will see limitations on many traditional forms of marketing that rely on human interaction, such as networking events, conventions and one-to-one meetings over coffee or lunch.

But there will be reverberations of that fallout on the marketing periphery as well: If events are curtailed, for example, so too will program book advertising, naming sponsorships, cocktail receptions and logoed swag-bag stuffers. And if you can’t take someone to lunch, what’s your back-up plan to nurture vital human relationships with key contacts in your network?

The trendlines are already revealing data that make such prognostication clearer. Law firms, attorneys and legal marketers should be reading these tea leaves and re-engineering their approaches accordingly. Now more than ever, old playbooks should be reconsidered, if not thrown out altogether.

On a recent episode of The Thought Leadership Project podcast that I co-host with my agency partner Jay Harrington, we recently went straight to the source to examine what available data are telling us: Adrian Lurssen, co-founder and VP of strategic development at JD Supra. If you listen to the entire episode, you’ll walk away with a better understanding of what current content consumption analytics tell us about where the eyeballs are today, and where they may stay affixed well into the future.

Content Is Still King: Thought Leaders Need to Ace It

Even acknowledging the overuse of the “content is king” trope, it bears emphasis and repeating, as it’s more true today than ever before. Buyers of sophisticated services such as legal have been relying on thought-leadership content to influence their own purchasing decisions for a long time now, despite the reluctance of many to recognize it.

What Adrian reports relative to his own platform’s insights bears this out:

• During the “lockdown” era, content consumption is up—way up.
• Time spent on individual pieces of content is longer than ever.
• Users are investing deeper engagement into content consumption, reading written thought leadership after watching a video, and perhaps proceeding to listening to a podcast to dive deeper.
• Consumption is more diversely multimedia than ever: people want to read, watch video, consume webinars, listen to podcasts...all at different tiers within their own personal content-funnel journeys.

People across all industries are looking for answers right now. In times of uncertainty, they are clearly turning to thought leaders for the comfort of knowledge and perspective, or for specific answers to discrete problems, or for a broadview prognostication of what the future holds more generally. They trust thought leaders to provide that content to them, and they will hold those opinions and viewpoints in high regard.

In time, when the moment arrives to hire a service provider, consumers turn first to those thought leaders who have already earned their esteem and trust for hiring consideration, far ahead of anyone else.

What Should We Do Now?

If it’s not obvious already, it’s clear the world is going digital. It’s been following that natural evolution for years, has become urgent and critical during a time of social distancing, and will only become more so as time rolls on. If there were ever a time for a lawyer to embrace digital tools, it’s now. And if there were ever a moment for law firm marketing departments to re-orient their strategies to match the growing demand of their constituents, it’s this one.

If there were ever a time for a lawyer to embrace digital tools, it’s now....

Yes, now. We have the time. We have the clarity of course. We have the tools at our ready disposal. If attorneys will not use the present moment to chart a new course to optimize their business development efforts, will they ever?

Adrian offers some guidance on what lawyers can do today—immediately—to begin or re-energize their efforts to ascend to market-niche thought leaders:

Invest in your writing. The written word is critical. It’s perhaps the most discoverable form of thought leadership—both by search engines and by actual humans who hire attorneys. It affords the thought leader unfettered time and space to demystify complexity at length and to demonstrate expertise in longform.

Get to the point. Take Adrian’s advice about not “burying the lede,” as they say. Provide analysis and value at the top of the content funnel, not buried deep in your 17th-paragraph conclusion.

Make yourself clear. Target your thought leadership to a very specific niche audience, then make it eminently clear who you’re addressing your content to—in the headline, in the opening, and even when you share it online. Don’t make readers dig for the payoff.

Mix the media. “Every law firm should have a podcast,” Adrian remarked to us on the podcast episode. He has seen behind the curtain to examine what users are consuming nowadays. Not only are podcasts in high demand, they provide depth and personality in a way that the written word cannot. Invite people into a deeper experience with your personality. Consumers hire experts they trust, but also people they like.

Embrace video. An even further representation of an attorney’s personality is the visual: Don’t let the pursuit of perfection become the enemy of the good-enough. Not every video project requires a crew, a set, lighting and a five-figure budget. In all likelihood, your smartphone comes equipped with a better camera than what was available for hundreds of dollars or more just a few years ago. And the internet-consuming market has been conditioned to accept (maybe even prefer) more casual, spontaneous and—yes—more personalized video at lower quality and virtually no budget.

Leverage digital. Lots to consider here:

• If you’re not proficient on LinkedIn, it’s past time to become so. Get help if you need to. There’s simply no good argument to be made by an attorney who eschews the world’s most powerful business-to-business social network in the year 2020.
• Don’t forget email. It’s long been the workhorse of content marketing, so don’t overlook it in your zeal to master new technologies. People spend far more time in front of their inboxes than they do anywhere else.
• You’ve likely mastered Zoom in recent weeks. Think about what possibilities that could open up for thought leaders who wish to host webinars, schedule colleague meet-ups, and host other online fora.

An Investment Today with Compounding Returns Tomorrow

Regardless of what the near- and long-term futures hold, there is no denying where the world is heading. Despite whatever growing pains you might experience today in making necessary changes to your old routines of the past, those rigors will reap returns forever! You’ll never look back and consider time spent today on modernizing and future-proofing your marketing efforts as energy wasted.

And those pains you feel along the way? Those are signs of progress. Just as you experience soreness when embarking on new exercise regimens, those aches and pains mean it’s working. Eventually, they go away, and in their place are muscles that make the next leap forward easier, more painless, and exponentially more impactful than when you started.

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Tom Nixon is a principal with Harrington Communications, a thought-leadership marketing agency serving lawyers and law firms. He co-hosts The Thought Leadership Project podcast with the firm's founder, Jay Harrington. His firm provides workshops and remote training sessions to attorneys looking to master the art of thought-leadership content writing.

Connect with Tom on LinkedIn; follow his latest on JD Supra.