Information Marketing is an approach to marketing that is focused on informing and educating an audience and putting them in a position to make an educated decision about what products and services to buy.
Unlike traditional marketing, Information Marketing explicitly avoids coercion and persuasion and anything “salesy”.
Principles of Information Marketing
Provide actual help – Solve actual problems.
Do this for free – If clients need to pay to see your expertise, you’re not really solving any problems or demonstrating any knowledge. Information Marketing is about adding value to your potential customers and trusting that if your product or service is truly useful, customers will eventually be willing to pay (why would customers pay if you give them answers for free?)
Information Marketing is NOT for you if:
If you are competing in a well-established consumer market with many similar competitors, it means that your potential audience is already familiar with your type of offering, and your efforts should therefore focus on brand awareness. Essentially, you’re trying to be more well-known than your competitors, to garner more attention. This is what marketing “normally” does and a “normal” marketing agency is your best bet.
Information Marketing could be for you if:
If your product or service is unique, specialised, well-crafted, highly expert-driven, if it’s not just a cookie-cutter product or service that everyone already knows and understands, you may require marketing that really unpacks what you have to offer.
We believe that information marketing is the way forward for products or services that have some of these characteristics:
Expert-driven knowledge services
Lawyers, consultants and other professional services providers, are selling their expertise. This require trust-building and demonstrating your knowledge. Information Marketing is the best way to do this.
Products that require solution selling
Solutions that cater to complex, multi-varied workflows that aren’t easy to explain in typical, flashy marketing campaigns.
Products that require demand generation
Being on the cutting edge means that prospects do not yet understand the value you offer. Market education needs to be built into your growth strategy
Products that targets a specialised audience
Your operate in specific niches and need to win over a specific market by demonstrating domain knowledge and expertise.
Products that are “content-centric”
Information is your product. For example, you offer online research tools, education resources, or some other digital content libraries.
As advocates of Information Marketing, we encourage our clients to give knowledge away, to help customers free of charge. For some, this seems counter intuitive. But its not.
If you’re a lawyer, knowing the the law is only part of your job. Your clients is also paying you to understand their problems, and to diligently apply the law to their matter at hand, to give them rational advice, to help them carefully navigate a legal risk or dispute.
So when you write a legal article that freely advises readers on a legal topic, you’re not giving away all of your value. On the contrary, you’re making it easier for your clients to trust you.
In the information age, all knowledge is already freely available on the web. If you think that you job is merely to know the law, and that you need to guard this knowledge carefully, you’re likely to fall behind.
Think about it from a clients perspective, they have to spend large amounts of money on legal counsel, its a big risk. How do they choose the right lawyer? What better way for them to make an informed choice than to actually get preliminary advice from a lawyer.
I’m much more likely to pay the lawyer that gives me initial valuable answers, than the one who tells me nothing but promises me that they will reveal the answers after I pay.
Why lawyers and (and other expert advisors) should share their knowledge freely online:
You are in the information business. It stands to reason that you need to be active in the information marketplace (i.e. the internet). If you want to participate, you need to share useful information, not keep it to yourself.
The more you share your expertise, the easier it is for your potential clients to find you.
For those who do not like hard selling, content marketing is ideal because it is non-intrusive, non-pushy, and genuinely helpful to people. It just happens to attract customers as a by-product of helping them.
Writing about your areas of expertise makes you better at articulating your knowledge. The skill of writing carries over into everything else you do as a knowledge professional.
Clients do their own research online before contacting an advisor. If you do not provide helpful information, your prospective clients will get it elsewhere.
Lawyers and legal marketers need to be more deliberate and thoughtful about how they communicate legal information. We tend to default to certain patterns that we’re comfortable with. A lawyer’s writing style is trained first in law school, writing academic essays to impress lecturers. Then once they’re working in law practice, writing professional legal opinions or court pleadings and the like which attempt to build up a case with all relevant information eventually building up to a watertight legal argument. Legal marketers often are trained in general digital marketing and may try carry over general content marketing tactics into law, where they may not necessarily serve the audience.
Creating a legal map
I’m not suggesting that there is one right way to for firms to share legal information. But I do believe that it’s important to break the shackles of what we we are comfortable with. When we create legal content our role is to put ourselves in the shoes of the readers, and work out how to serve them.
Our legal information is primarily a map to help the reader navigate through legal, business and life obstacles. Usually these are technical and complex for the readers, otherwise they wouldn’t be looking for a lawyer. And our job is to find a way to make it simpler and each to digest, to demystify and provide readers with a sense of comfort and hope that they can traverse this landscape.
Explaining the law visually
I’ve been increasingly exploring ways to represent the law in visual ways from mindmaps, to flowcharts. I’m finding the results to be pleasing and effective and I see this being an increasing emphasis of our content producing at Onyo Mark.
Visual legal aids are an excellent distinguishing feature. They make a complex legal topic infinitely more digestible. And it demonstrates a real effort by the lawyers to try and empathise with the reader and help them through a topic.
In future posts I’ll provide some depth and guidance on how to go about this. But some good starting points for those who want to experiment are
The approach most firms take to legal marketing can best be described as “throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks”. But in the 15 years I’ve been working in legal marketing, I’ve seen what works. Mediocre content barely moves the needle; good legal content is a lead generation machine that is hard to match.
I’m still finding that law firms and other professional services firms tend to lack a coherent approach to content. This results in legal content that is sub-optimal and yields mediocre results for the firm.
Content marketing as a discipline originates from fields unrelated to law and advisory services (for example, public relations and brand marketing). As a result, many firms, being advised by traditional content marketers, are utilising a content marketing strategy that is ill-suited for their industry.
If you expect your fee earners to give up precious time to writing content, you want to ensure that content goes a long way.
With this in mind, I’ve listed some key considerations that I believe are specifically suited to professional services firms who want to see exceptional results from their content marketing efforts:
1. Write content that has a long lifespan
Many law firms utilise the services of a public relations agency to help produce and distribute their content. However, PR agencies focus their content on news publications, which of course are designed to be read this week and then discarded. To get published in a news publication, the articles need to be highly relevant to whatever is hot in the news. But that means it quickly loses relevance and fails to be effective in the long term.
There is a place for news-focused PR, but law firms should prioritise content that has a longer shelf-life. This could include legal advice and thought leadership pieces commenting on a specific business sector.
2. Market your content
This directly follows from the point above. If legal content has a long shelf life, it means that it is a long-term asset. And like all assets, it should be looked after to maximise its lifespan and ensure a healthy return on investment. This means that once a content piece is published, it should be tended to regularly. There are a few things to keep in mind in this regard:
Help people find the content by linking to it from as many places as reasonably possible, e.g. from other related articles and from relevant pages of your website.
Inform your audience of the new content. Mention it in your email newsletters to your clients.
Convert the articles into short social media snippets and share these snippets on social media with a link to the article. This can be done when first published, but also every few months if the content remains relevant.
Ensure your content is SEO optimised so that readers find it from search engines long into the future.
3. Set your post up for lead generation
You wouldn’t set up a shop without a cashier. But many insight articles are published without providing an easy way for the reader to contact the author.
The point of content marketing is to generate new business. But law firms are making simple errors that undermine these efforts. Some of the tactics below make a reader more likely to send an inquiry:
Cite a specific lawyer as the author (not just the law firm). Where possible, include a photo, a bio, and contact details for the lawyer.
Include a lead form alongside the article.
At the end of the article, add a line inviting readers to send any queries to the author.
When a lead comes in, respond within 1-2 hours. People who send leads online may contact two or more firms. Quick responses matter if you want to win the client.
4. Focus on helping the client rather than showing off your knowledge
A common error law firms make is to write theoretical articles in the style of a law school essay. One reason for this error is that law firms often assign content writing to juniors who are still programmed to write for law school. These juniors may, understandably, be more concerned about proving their knowledge than about winning new clients for the firm.
But your clients are not looking for a legal education. They need a solution to a specific problem. Use your experience to identify the real pressing concerns of your clients. Simply think back to your most recent cases and identify the specific pain points and legal obstacles faced by your clients, and how you solved these obstacles. Then write a practical help guide designed to help other people with that same problem.
Instead of writing a general piece about some new legislation that has come into effect, get more practical and write, for example, about the most pressing compliance risk that arises from this legislation and what measures you can take to mitigate it.
Rather than writing about some new precedent-setting case law, put yourself in the shoes of a client and try to directly tackle the legal implications it may have for your clients.
5. Write compelling headlines
Many firms’ articles seem to mimic magazine-style titles, like ‘Sleep When You’re Dead’, which says nothing about the content of the article.
Other firms make the mistake of being overly legalistic, using titles that mention specific cases or legal acronyms.
What law firms should do is use the headline to tell the reader exactly what benefit they will get from reading the article. Don’t get cute or complicated with it. Your headline is your hook, so choose it wisely. In fact, choose it before you’ve written your article; it’s the most important part.
6. Do not hold back on the important information
Although law firms have, thankfully, realised the importance of sharing information, there is still a mistaken perception that law content should be general and basic. Lawyers seem to believe that they should withhold the most valuable information as this is valuable IP to be reserved for paying customers only.
We find that it is almost impossible to share too much. Even if you give the client all the information they need to write the contract themselves, they still need you. Do not underestimate the level of value you add by virtue of your knowledge and expertise. If you think that giving away the wording of a clause negates your value, then you’re selling yourself short. Instead, giving your reader a full answer helps demonstrate your expertise, builds trust and makes it more likely that your reader will send an inquiry.
Your marketing efforts are wasted without alignment and strategy.
Successful content strategy requires a robust foundation that aligns with business goals.
Focusing on content output is wasteful and inefficient.
Avoid chasing vanity metrics. Your content efforts need to actually drive new business.
You need a streamlined, clear-eyed focus to produce the content that counts.
Onyo Mark helps you craft a content strategy that sets you apart in a competitive market.
Let’s collaboratively get clarity on what content to create, who will create it, and how it will be distributed.
Avoid wasting time and resources creating ineffective content.
A framework for high-quality content that resonates with your target audience.
Optimise your website’s content for search engines, leading to higher search rankings and increased organic traffic.
Ensure that your content is consistent in terms of quality, tone, and style.
Market audience groups to your various service offerings and ensure a content mix that speaks to these audiences.
Ensure all content produced is directly tied to key business outcomes, enhancing ROI from marketing efforts.
Create a content playbook that gives all your marketing stakeholders a system to work from.
Define metrics and reports to track success and ensure improvement over time.
