Takeaway (For Busy Lawyers)

Lawyers can save time on marketing and boost how readers engage with their articles by doing the following:

Time Saver: You shouldn’t constantly research and write new article topics. Instead, you can make your readers much happier if you focus on reusing and improving your most popular articles (e.g. the articles getting the most hits on Google Analytics and likes on Linkedin).
Engagement Boosters: You can make your readers even more interested in your most popular articles by doing the following:
- Make it easier for readers to reach these articles (e.g. posting them on social media, moving them to your home page, or creating links to these articles from other articles/website content)
- Create follow-up articles expanding on the same topic (e.g. writing a new article from the perspective of a different party)
- Transform the article into another form of interesting material for potential clients (e.g. create a case study, white paper, or client seminar)

Introduction

Recently, I had an interesting conversation with a content curator for the BBC news website. In this role, he was responsible for enhancing how visitors engaged with the website. In other words, once visitors came to the BBC site, he needed to keep them in the website as long as possible.

To accomplish this, he focused on the following three metrics:

Total Active Readers: How many people are reading the article right now? (This metric ranks the articles in terms of current popularity.)
% of Continuing Readers: What percentage of readers click to another BBC page/link after they read an article? (As opposed to simply leaving the BBC.)
Duration of Reading: On average, how long do people spend reading an article?

What would you do?

How would you use the above metrics to keep people on the BBC site? As a lawyer, you might think the best approach would be to identify the worst articles and improve these. However, he did the exact opposite. He spent all of his time and energy on improving the best articles. (As he explained, “Why should I waste my time on the crap nobody is reading?”)

He made the best articles even better with the following four steps:

He identified the articles that had the highest numbers of current readers (i.e. the most popular articles).
He increased the number of their active readers by moving these articles to prominent positions in the site (e.g. the headline of relevant pages and top article lists).
He increased the time that readers spent on these articles by deleting weaker content and restructuring the articles with more attractive headlines and imagery.
He increased the percentage of readers staying in the site by inserting links to other popular (and relevant) content.

How can you save time and boost engagement?

In law school, we are trained to be research superstars. As a result, we develop the habit of thinking that researching is really important. Although you obviously need to maintain your research skills in order to keep yourself up to date on the law, you might not realize that excessive researching can be counter-productive for your marketing articles.

When lawyers write articles, they tend to completely research a new topic for each article. Unfortunately, this research is expensive as it takes time and, most likely, its non-billable. But, even worse, in many cases, you cannot justify this expense because very few people actually read your articles. To solve these problems, do the following:

identify your best articles
build upon your best articles

Identify Your Best Articles

If you would like to minimize your time waste (i.e. spend less time on researching new topics), then spend just a little time identifying your most popular articles. You can find these articles by examining your firm’s Google Analytics reports. In particular, focus on the articles that received the most views as well as the longest duration of reading. You can also find these articles by checking your post results on social media (e.g. Linkedin). In particular, focus on the article posts with the most likes, shares, and comments.

Build Upon Your Best Articles

Once you identify your most popular articles, think like the BBC guy to boost the engagement of your readers. For example, why not make it easier for readers to reach these articles? Try the following:

if you are not doing it already, post a link to the article on social media
ask your IT guy to create a link to the article on your bio page
modify other articles and website content to create links to your article

Next, instead of doing more research and writing, use your existing research to expand upon the topics of your most popular articles. For example, if you wrote your original article from the perspective of a buying company, why not write a second article taking the perspective of the seller? Similarly, if your original article was aimed at a certain type of client, why not create a second article that interviews an existing client about the same topic. (Remember: Your client will be interested in such an interview, because the original article was interesting.)

As a final step, if you are too lazy to write another article, you can still boost the engagement of your readers by transforming the article into a different form of interesting content. For example, you can reuse articles effectively as follows:

transform the article into a toolkit for readers
develop a case study based on the article
create a short survey report of your clients based on an interesting question in your article
set up a client workshop based on the article

Final Thoughts

Break the bad habit of over-researching your articles. Focus on improving and re-using your best work.

If you would like help with saving time on article writing or making even better articles, contact us for a free consultation.

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BBC Lessons: Lawyers can market better by doing less