How do we design immediately actionable research with longer term implications? In our latest video installment, we explore a few different nimble and flexible approaches to research that help professional services organizations demonstrate true subject matter authority and drive door opening conversations for client development during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
As professional services organizations navigate one of the most fluid and uncertain health and economic crises of our lifetime, firm leaders face a multitude of complex and interconnected issues around their most precious commodity: their talent.
Given the pandemic’s impact on virtually every business and industry, from neighborhood coffee shops to global conglomerates, professional services organizations – trailing indicators of the macro economy – are exploring all options to preserve cash and bolster their financial positions.
Some of those options are the same as in any sudden downturn. But in this case, firm leaders must also grapple with the fact that this is a health and human crisis – not just a financial one. It’s not only their coworker’s livelihoods at stake – it’s their lives.
So unfortunately, looking back to learn from previous downturns has limited utility. Those in the trenches during the dot-com crash of 2000, the horrific events of Sept. 11, 2001 or the great recession of 2007-2009 know the conversation around staff reductions today is much different.
Further complicating matters, mental health and wellness were major issues before COVID-19 kicked professional anxiety into a new gear – and firms are reluctant to part ways with talent whom they may want to rehire in a few months’ time.
While every firm’s situation and circumstances are different, so too are the considerations for reducing professional and staff-related costs – and, equally important, the process for communicating those decisions.
Whether you’ve already communicated the measures your firm has taken to reduce staff-related costs or are in the midst of advising leadership on how to communicate an imminent move, it’s worth reiterating: this is a health and human crisis. Before you say or do anything, consider how your actions might be perceived by those who are suffering or close to those suffering.
Here are additional points to keep in mind when communicating with internal and external audiences:
(1) Don’t be afraid to share what you learned from the past or how this is different
(2) Prepare your leaders to be in front
(3) Remember that prospective talent remains an important stakeholder
(4) Stress a “leaders eat last” message
(5) Be up front about hard staffing decisions
It’s worth repeating our central theme – this crisis is about people, not numbers. Professional services firms need to keep this front and center in their decision-making when it comes to communications or otherwise.
Just like you, we are actively monitoring the developing COVID-19 global pandemic. Our team has quickly acclimated to a new way of working while staying focused on addressing and supporting our clients’ most pressing and emerging needs. Everything we’re doing as an organization centers on two questions:
1. How can PR/Marketing maintain demand for services NOW?
2. How can PR/Marketing drive demand for services LATER?
Guided by these critical questions, we’re currently focused on these five paths forward:
We’ve established a COVID-19 news bureau to stay ahead of the accelerated news cycle. Our team uses several data tools to identify the white space on saturated topics so that we can help craft fresh and empathetic POVs heading into the next phase of the reporting (and buying) cycle.
Organizations are publishing around the clock, offering clients actionable guidance via resource centers, alerts, webinars and podcasts. Our team is working to extend the reach and impact of these critical efforts to distinguish POV. But we also know that we need to remain sensitive to the extraordinary circumstances these audiences are facing. Guided by the words of our editor-in-chief, Brandon Copple: “We can’t forget that this is a human crisis. Every sentence and every angle must be crafted with care and with empathy.” Audience fatigue on the COVID-19 topic is already setting in as the noise steadily increases. Your audiences want information that is concise and grounded in utility – what do I need to do now?
During a time of social distancing and shifting buyer needs, our research & market intelligence team’s experience in conducting online focus groups and qualitative interviews with C-level buyers has never been more important to identifying new and emerging areas of need by practice and industry. We predict that the social distancing in practice across the country will create opportunities to tap into the collective intelligence of audiences that have historically been hard to reach and engage.
Our research and innovation teams are collaborating to help our clients reimagine their value propositions based on what their clients need today in response to the pandemic– and what they will need tomorrow. Leveraging a process developed in partnership with our longstanding partner Greenhouse: Innovation, we stand ready to help identify new ways to market and message both existing and NEW offerings in development.
With COVID-19’s threat to business continuity, we are actively planning to identify the next wave of pandemic-related scenarios and issues so that we can model and message against them in advance. The goal is to ensure maximum preparedness when new events and circumstances arise. We are also acutely aware that the next phase of the narrative will almost certainly involve the need for organizations to message carefully around workforce reductions and mergers/acquisitions.
We’re here to help and would welcome a chat to discuss what we’re learning in real time.
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
Philosophical thought experiments and professional services marketing don’t appear to have much in common. But in a content ecosystem where every firm is vying for the mantle of thought leader, the comparison is pertinent. Except the question might be, “If a single tree falls in a forest where hundreds of trees are falling around it at the same time, does anyone notice it?”
We’re at a point in the arc of thought leadership where the term itself has lost some of its meaning. That’s because most firms approach content marketing from the thought perspective — attempting to create useful, novel, urgent analysis on the issues of the day – while ignoring the leader angle that implies cultivation of heavy readership within key audiences. The result is a lot of well-written content that isn’t breaking through to those audiences.
For years at Greentarget, we’ve studied this phenomenon and it was a key consideration in our 2019 State of Digital & Content Marketing Survey. We found that busy executives increasingly prefer vendor websites and blogs as sources of information. And they still trust traditional media’s credibility above all other sources.
That gives firms and their marketers multiple avenues for engaging C-suite audiences. But to do that effectively, they have to ensure their owned content and published bylines are conveying true authority – by providing the value executives want: relevance, novelty, urgency and, above all, utility.
The beautiful thing is that SEO, when combined with expert editorial judgment and a deep understanding of the relevant issues, can help deliver all of those things. In other words, it’s not just a tool for optimizing your web pages – SEO can actually make content better. In fact, combining these three elements will supercharge the editorial process.
SEO research is a proxy for user interests: because search queries represent informational needs, this type of analysis helps marketers identify the topics that matter and how they can answer audiences’ most burning questions. Instilling SEO techniques into your editorial process will not only lead to more effective website architecture and better search ranking for your content, but a much deeper understanding of your customers and their current needs that translates into stronger and more relevant points of view. All of this is essential for organizations working to pinpoint and focus on the topics and attributes decision-makers value most.
Finally, SEO is critical for lead generation. Traffic from search, known as organic traffic, is almost always going to be more engaged than traffic from other channels because it represents users who are actively seeking content in response to a need, rather than just clicking on an ad they were served or a post they stumbled across. Creating content that anticipates their most pressing needs is the most effective way to keep them coming back for more, thereby establishing a strong pipeline of leads from your content marketing efforts.
Optimizing your site for organic traffic means optimizing for strong user experience, and in an environment where dozens of firms with similar practices are frantically publishing similar content, SEO techniques will help make your thought leadership visible and valuable. Making that content findable, navigable, and actionable will create a lasting competitive edge that will establish your site as a repeat destination for thought leadership.
A version of this article appeared in the 2019 State of Digital & Content Marketing Survey, released in July 2019.
Not long after Greentarget and Zeughauser Group closed the 2019 State of Digital & Content Marketing Survey, LinkedIn made news when it announced details about changes to its algorithm – changes that validated trends that we’ve been reporting on for years.
Long the preferred social platform for executives and decision makers, LinkedIn made the algorithmic changes to favor more relevant conversations that (as Axios described them) cater to niche professional interests. In other words, LinkedIn realized that viral content wasn’t as important to users as content that they can actually use.
That echoed what we found in our survey (for the second consecutive year) about the importance of useful content – i.e., utility. Both in-house attorneys and C-suite executives want content that’s useful above all things. Because we live in an era when C-suite executives can be as engaged in choosing a law firm as in-house legal officers – and vice-versa for management consultants and other non-legal service firms – this year we compared their content consumption behaviors and preferences.
In-house counsel and C-suite executives define utility quite differently – and understanding those differences is crucial for marketing officers in the age of information overload. Finding ways to make content stand out was also important to LinkedIn, and the results for the social media platform have so far been impressive. Likewise, we believe that professional services marketers can deliver a stronger payoff for their content by taking to heart the findings in this year’s State of Digital & Content Marketing Survey.
In our ninth survey this decade, we provide deep dives and practical guidance – utility, you might say – on topics that are top of mind (or should be) for marketers. We cover content strategy, the keys to content creation, search engine optimization, the importance of research and, of course, how to best leverage LinkedIn.
It’s never been more important – or more challenging – to stand out above the noise when trying to reach decision makers. But that means there’s an incredible opportunity for those who get it right.
We say “thought leadership” too much in this business. We do it. Our clients do it. The whole industry does it. Last year thought leader even overcame leverage to win the title as the most overused term in PR.
Any term getting tossed around that much is bound to lose its punch and, eventually, its meaning. Thus you’ll find plenty of voices advocating that we stop using the phrase thought leadership altogether.
I’m usually all about eliminating buzzwords – if I could take leverage out back and shoot it, it’d be dead before close of business – but in this case I think there’s a better way: We don’t need to stop saying “thought leadership,” we need to start producing actual thought leadership.
Because the real problem is not the phrase itself, it’s that there are too many people producing too much content and calling it thought leadership. There are a lot of reasons for that, of course. Publishing is cheap and easy. Marketers have thought leadership fever. There’s too much focus on quantity. Lots of would-be thought leaders don’t know what real thought leadership is or how to produce it.
That last problem is the hardest to solve, and one we encounter a lot. Our clients are incredibly smart, accomplished professionals, many of whom counsel the world’s most sophisticated businesses. They clearly have a lot to say.
But would-be thought leaders too often get hung up on what they want to say, without stopping to consider what their audience wants to hear. Or they get lost in the forest of their expertise and wind up with content that amounts to, as one legal marketer recently described it to us, “nerds talking to nerds about nerdy things.”
Most of the time our key audiences – the people in the C-suite, typically – are not among those nerds. So nerdy content has almost no chance of engaging them or reeling in new business for our clients.
When that happens it’s at least partly our fault. Our job is not just to take notes and churn out content based on whatever comes out of an SME’s mouth, it’s also to educate them about what thought leadership means and on what actual thought leadership looks like.
To help us do that, we created a framework that breaks it down into four attributes. Here it is.
We didn’t just pull these four categories out of thin air. We chose them based on our experience and knowledge of what works and what doesn’t – and on our data. This year’s State of Digital and Content Marketing Report – coming in July – cements our belief that these characteristics make content far more likely to engage executive readers. Let’s look at each of them.
Relevance – Obvious, right? If it’s not relevant, why would anybody read it? Not surprisingly, our survey of in-house counsel and C-suite officers reveals that relevance ranks among the top three attributes those executives look for in articles, newsletters, podcasts and in-person events – in other words, all the content professional services firms produce most.
Novelty – When I was a writer at Forbes, I lived in mortal fear of discovering that a story I was working on had already been written by somebody at the Wall Street Journal or Business Week. If it had, and my editor found out, there would’ve been hell to pay. We all understood that if we weren’t giving our readers something new, something they couldn’t get anywhere else, there would be no reason for them to read the magazine. The same holds true in the thought leadership game: If you’re not saying something new, how can it be thought leadership?
Urgency – How many times do you bookmark something or otherwise set it aside to read later – and then never read it at all. Content that’s not important now is far less likely to win the battle for an executive’s attention. For the second year in a row both the C-suite and the GCs tell us they value content that’s current over all but one other attribute….
Utility – Both C-level and GC audiences say utility is by far the quality that attracts them most to the content they consume. These are busy people in a hyper-competitive world, so it makes sense that when they decide to read, watch, listen to or attend something, they’re not doing it just to tickle their curiosity. They’re looking for insights that will help them do their jobs better.
We also believe that utility is the quality that’s most likely to move a reader closer to a purchasing decision. Content that’s just interesting or informative might make a good impression. But if it tells them what they need to do, they’re far more likely to reach for the phone, to call the author and say “I need you to help me do that.”
And that, at the end of the day, is why we’re producing thought leadership in the first place.
A version of this article appears in Greentarget’s 2019 State of Digital and Content Marketing Survey; that report will be published in July.
