The volume of legal content skyrocketed over the past year, with firms now taking advantage of more and more of the content marketing toolkit. However, certain tricks are yet to be used to their fullest extent. Conventionally, content is produced at the firm level with the goal to educate clients, showcase expertise, become an authority, and provide industry insights. Though these are all crucial elements of a successful content calendar, it is in many ways just half of the story. Digital platforms now being so widely used and accessible by anyone, there is a greatly overlooked opportunity to tap into emotionally targeted content that resonates on the human level.
Content purpose moves along the spectrum of entertaining, inspiring, educating, and convincing with the top two quadrants targeting emotions and the bottom two speaking to our cognition. Historically law firms have put a great emphasis on the educate and convince pieces with webinars, articles and various reports but few have taken full advantage of the emotive content opportunities.
One of the aftereffects of the pandemic has been the growing demand for light-hearted digital content as we started practicing escapism from what was a grim reality at the time. Nonetheless, the entertain and inspire quadrants were powerful even before, as they create an opportunity for clients to relate to firms more effortlessly. The “behind the scenes” snippets from lawyers or fundraising activities that promote the firm’s values, despite not being law nor expertise related, have the power to generate just as much tangible business.
Emotional resonance is a critical building block of trust, which we know to be a significant indicator of success in the world of law. Clients are in an emotionally heightened state when they look for legal advice, and whilst this by no means suggests that they lose their logical sense, they still ultimately look for the mental ease that someone, who knows better than them, has their best interest. Seeing a firm’s speciality is an important part of this process, but the differentiation between expert and expert happens on the human level. Connecting through values and other dimensions of personal factors taps into our inherent tendency to seek homophily, as from an evolutionary perspective it is deeply encoded in humans that those who are in some way similar to us can be trusted- “Birds of a feather flock together.”
Whether they know or not, lawyers are part time marketers and in fact, every single employee is. Their advocacy of the firm, the care they have for clients and their dedication to excellence in service delivery will in every case outperform the firm-level content in terms of relatability. Whilst there is often a common concern around employees creating content, not encouraging their unique spin on current happenings or the world of law in general is in fact a missed opportunity.
Individual professional content creates a possibility for the firm to resonate with clients who might have different personalities, even though they belong to the same broadly defined target audience. Maintaining a consistent brand personality for the firm is tremendously important but it inherently restricts the variety of people you can win the trust of as the precious feeling demands a tone of voice that brands at large cannot perform. By encouraging employees to create their own content, firms can bridge this gap and expand their reach to different personalities by emphasizing the unique perspectives of their own people. Not to mention that, by supporting content creation across functions, the firm’s presence will be more widely spread, the content can be reshared, amplifying the overall impact as well as advance SEO results from crosslinking.
