Most firms think they have a content strategy because they’re publishing content and they’ve planned it a couple of weeks in advance.
Unfortunately you almost certainly don’t. What you have is content and a to-do list. You can usually spot it within thirty seconds of looking at a firm’s output. Not because anything is badly written, but because nothing connects to anything else. Each piece stands alone. A strategy isn’t a pile of (perhaps great) content, it’s content that builds on itself, piece by piece.
Here are some of the indicators that you might need to work on your content strategy
The partner bios don’t sound like one firm
Read six of them back to back and you’d struggle to say they came from the same website. One is all credentials and case names. Another reads like a dating profile. A third hasn’t been touched since 2019 and still lists a deal the partner closed at their old firm. They’re written one lawyer at a time, by whoever has ten minutes to spare.
LinkedIn is a noticeboard, not a channel
New hire. Award shortlist. Case win. Speaking slot. Each post is fine on its own. But there’s no sense identity, no message, no targeting, no reason for any of it to exist beyond filling the feed.
The directory submission and the website don’t agree with each other
The submission makes a sharp, specific case for why this practice group is different. The website, three clicks away, falls back on “full-service” and “trusted advisers” trope. A researcher checking both will notice, and when the specific claim isn’t backed up anywhere else, they’ll discount it. A client doing due diligence will draw the same conclusion, for the same reason.
The content calendar runs on “someone needs to post something this week”
Every bio, every submission, every web page might be perfectly competent on its own. What’s missing is a shared answer to one question: what is the firm trying to say this quarter, across everything it publishes? Nobody’s asked it, so nobody’s answering it. Each piece gets written in isolation, by whoever’s free, with no idea what the last piece said or what the next one needs to say.
What it’s actually costing you
You’re probably duplicating effort
When your content is more “chuck it at the wall and see what sticks” rather than a structured plan, it’s pretty likely you’ll be paying repeatedly for the same job. Your directories consultant builds one case for a practice group. Your website copywriter builds another. Your BD team pitches a third to a prospective client. Nothing supports the others. Three teams end up building and delivering three separate plans, when the whole point of a strategy is that everyone should be working from the same one.
Cross-selling becomes even more illusive
When you haven’t established a clear target audience and message, linked to commercial objectives, there’s a fair chance you’ll have closed off cross-selling opportunities before they’ve even started. If your private client team and your corporate team sound like they belong to different firms, a client who trusts one has no reason to trust the other. That client stays with one team and never hears about the other. Importantly, if you haven’t thought about how they might intersect and benefit that client, so that you can make a considered introduction, you’ve really missed a golden opportunity.
Consistency equals trust
And finally, let’s not forget that we’re ultimately selling people and relationships here. The biggest driver towards decision-making and instruction has nothing to do with expertise and everything to do with engaging with the “people” elements – does the reader trust and engage with what you’re saying. If the message is scatter-gun, inconsistent and speaks a language they don’t understand, just guess what that tells them about how you practise law.
The fix isn’t more content
The instinct, when output feels thin or inconsistent, is to produce more of it. To just work harder. Another blog post. Another LinkedIn push. Unfortunately that doesn’t fix a strategy gap. It just multiplies the inconsistency.
What actually closes the gap is the layer underneath the content: a clear view of what you’re saying, in what voice, to which audience, and how each piece of output should connect to the next.
Get that right and existing content starts working harder without a single extra word being written. Bios read as one firm. Submissions and the website reinforce each other instead of contradicting each other. LinkedIn starts saying something instead of announcing a diary.
Where to start
We would always advise starting by taking a step back.
- Conduct an honest audit of what you’re already saying across your website, LinkedIn, directory submissions and pitch decks.
- Talk to clients and referrers to understand their impressions of your firm and people. Ask them how they would describe you and see if it measures up to what you think and what’s in your organisational strategic plan. Do they know you’re your values or USPs are? Your target audiences or niche areas of expertise?
- Consider where your content is consistent. And where it contradicts itself.
- Map all of this against the goals you have in your organisational strategic plan. Does your content help you achieve these goals? Can you see how it’s linking in and contributing? What are you doing well, not so well and what’s going to actually stop you achieving what you’ve set out?
- And then, finally, work out where the gaps actually are and what you need to do to translate this new insight into a practical action plan for your content.
That’s what a messaging and content strategy gives you: a clear picture of where you stand now, and a practical plan for making everything you publish say the same thing, in the same voice, everywhere it counts.
If you’d like to talk to us about your messaging and content strategy – whether for an existing firm or because you’re launching in a new jurisdiction or merging with another firm – we’d love to help you take that step back and then join everything up.
