Joe has been working with law firms in the UK for over 20 years. Advising and creating technology to help legal professionals get their knowldge and information out to clients and a wider audience
To do this he’s created
www.words4business.com
www.legalrss.uk
https://www.myinfonet.co.uk
Here’s a fascinating article that may not go down too well with some blogging prophets and their acolytes.
Joe writes…..
There’s a lot of talk on the web about influencer marketing, and even more about content marketing…but most of both ignores some pretty fundamental stuff about how people behave. In part, this is due to a confusion about the meaning of different data and in part the usual ‘smoke and mirrors’ that you get in marketing and even more so in IT.
Let’s go back to basics (I always think the first thing you should ask yourself when being pitched to is – ‘Does this make sense?’) Your firm (unless you are a PI firm) probably gets most of its business from repeats and referrals. I often hear people rejoice that this is the source of 80% of their business. But, since every client you have will have about 150 people they influence (look up ‘Dunbar’s number’ on the web), and on average 1 in 7 adults will need a lawyer annually, then even with a very high overlap, IN PRINCIPLE, all you have to do to grow rapidly is to leverage your existing clients properly and get them to make referrals and that’s your BD done. This is not the right place to discuss how to do that and I am not concerned here with the maintenance and nurturing of relationships, but tech certainly has a role to play: a massive one, because a lot of the process can be automated.
Let’s talk instead about REACH. Imagine you have a section of 150 clients all have 150 in their circle and that the overlap is 80% throughout the first stage of the network. Your potential ‘audience’ – based on positions with influence only – is then 150 x 150 x (100-80%)…4,500…and since the overlap is four times that, the chances of being multiply referred to the same person are substantial also.
If you leveraged your first-order relationships brilliantly, you probably couldn’t cope with that scale of influx of new business that would result and you wouldn’t have to do anything else at all.
But here’s another thought…as you build a network, the numbers get really big really fast…this is why social media can be so powerful. Because the numbers can be made so big, the fact that the relationships are weak is overwhelmed by the volume…and, of course, the bigger a network, the more overlap there is likely to be and the amount of reinforcement of messages that will occur because the same people will receive them from different connections they have.
I am going to talk about LinkedIn here, because it is the only social network I use and is unparalleled for B2B business development among social media.
Let’s take an actual example. If I search for the number people on LinkedIn who have the job title of solicitor and who are 1st, 2nd, or 3rd degree contacts of mine (Not all are solicitors, of course, but on the other hand many managing partners etc don’t list solicitor in their job descriptions). I found:
1. I have more than 6,500 1st level connections who work in UK legal practice… mainly in senior positions. I am two further steps away from more than 85,000 (there are about 175,000 on the roll). I have no idea how many of the latter are actually using LI, but I do know on an average day I get between 3,000 and 4,000 views of my posts n LinkedIn and when the data come back about who they are, at least 1 third are decision maker titles in the sorts of firms I want to call.
2. But is it better than that… My first level connectedness in the legal market via LinkedIn represents better than 1 in 30 of ALL the solicitors on the roll in the UK or 1 in 80 of all the people who work in the industry. Remember Dunbar’s number? Apply that and the question becomes one of how many UK solicitors in practice we are NOT just one further step away from.
Another example…
If I check out company directors in Gloucester, UK (pop 130,000 – we have clients there), I see that I am a first-level connection of 5 per cent of all company directors there (we have built some connectedness there and in other cities to help clients gain more coverage) who are on Linkedin and when I share an item from a client firm there, it typically gets 150 or so reads a time. (The absolute record was 16,000 last June, but that was an outlier!). The data LI gives about who they are leads me to believe that about a third of those are company directors in Gloucester. As far as I can work out, there are about 1200 company directors in Gloucester, so my posts are being read by 4% of all of them…now apply Dunbar’s number…
I’m going to stop the maths regarding social networks there, because I hope the implications are now quite clear: If you achieve a number of dissemination paths you can amplify the penetration of your message considerably.
What content is about.
We supply much more content to many more firms than anyone else, so you’d expect us to wobble on at length about how powerful it is etc. However, we aren’t so precious. The point of WEB content, we think, is to make it more likely that people will try to start a REAL relationship with your firm (typically by picking up the phone) than another firm which lacks content.
The point of content is to be SEEN and attract attention, NOT to be impressive (unless you are targeting a professional audience). We have been experimenting with measuring views on LinkedIn (easily the most powerful medium for commercial client acquisition on the web).
I write blogs and circulate blogs for other commentators. A good blog probably takes a couple of hours to do. Typically, these get about 50-60 reads. I also write highly targeted short posts. I average more than 3,500 reads a DAY of my posts and my LI following is growing by about 80 a week (and in a very highly targeted way).
The messages this implies are clear:
Post a lot.
Post short-form material (500 words max) that is bright and appealing (write this in your client’s language, not yours)
Don’t waste valuable time and effort on unique long-form content.
Concentrate on achieving DISTRIBUTION (which can be automated) through multiple distribution paths.
Be First – No-one will read the 5th e-newsletter or blog post about something covered four times before.
The more relevant the material, the greater then engagement…so TARGETED e-newsletters, TARGETED content on web pages and so on. Always be up to date. Keep costs down. It is more important to be seen and noticed than digested at length.
Redistribute your content by social media and directly by content sharing. The former is getting some air time now, so I’ll leave it on one side…the latter isn’t getting any press but it is even better and here’s an example. This can all be automated and done for peanuts once you have built your network.
Why content sharing works.
Say your accountants are (like mine was) an 11 partner firm. They’ll be running 2,000-2,500 clients in all probability (say 2200), Say you already act for 300 of those and can’t act for another 400. That means your accountants have 1500 potential clients for your firm they already act for. Not only that, they’ll be VERY highly qualified…probably local (Google told us directly a few years back that 86% of searches for professional services advice specify a locality), they probably pay their bills and they can afford accountants – AND they have an existing relationship of trust with the firm.
Now, your accountants don’t do a lot of the things you do. You don’t do a lot of the things they do. Suppose they let you have content on their site (or you set up a joint one…you can add other people to this too which you all drive traffic to) and vice versa. Since this is non-competitive, you avoid the ‘If we do something with firm A, firm B will stop referring to us’ argument that the more paranoid partners like to put up (it’s a straw man…).
Now play with some maths. Say in an average year 75% of their clients (forget everyone who isn’t although that is clearly a goodly number also) visit their website. (That’s 1650). Suppose one in 5 sees your material and 1 in 5 of those reads it. That’s 66 and 1 in 4 of local viewers (only) enquire, that’s 17 and if you convert half of those (which would be bad), that’s 8 new instructions a year…and the cost? For buying someone lunch once and going through the maths plus a bit of easy automation. After that the oncost is effectively zero.
Now imagine doing something similar with the charities you act for, other professionals and so on. Do your own maths and forget the brand awareness benefits, which will be considerable.
Now imagine setting up your own publishing group including several non-competitive sources all of whom add content and share it and display it through their own websites and redistribute it…. I did some maths on the way to see a client in a city of about 100,000…it’s a bit ‘back of a fag packet’, but I reckon if we get the right 10 firms involved, we can have presence in front of more than 80% of the whole of the local business market…and with the technology we’ll be providing, once set up, the additional effort/time needed to be taken to do this is precisely ZERO...and there’s the chance that the sponsoring firm may make a profit on the exercise in addition to the extra work generated.
The maths here are so much more compelling that would happen in the same service area than SEO…and in effect, you are not only leveraging other people’s highly targeted contacts and brand value (they are also trusted advisers) but also every participant will benefit from every other participant’s business development efforts on the web.
Setting up such a group with 10 subscribers can be done in a couple of hours and costs peanuts to run….probably why your ad agency will never talk to you about this.
Needless to say, we have already built the tech for the publishing platform: the Myinfonet.com system that drives Legalrss.uk.
If you got to here: well done. You’ll be one of the few. And my posts that long-from blogging is dead will get far more reads than this…probably 20-100 times as many…
Joe Reevy
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joereevy/
Best Practice Online Ltd.
9 Howell Rd
Exeter
Devon
EX44LG
Tel: + 44 (0)1392-423607 Mob: 07990 593190
