Guest article: Matt Baldwin, Coast
Professional services firms are prolific creators of content. It has been the bedrock of marketing and business development activity for decades.
Content hubs offer a wide range of thought leadership, technical updates, white papers, blogs, press releases, podcasts and video. It is a glorious and often jumbled mix of genuinely fascinating and valued insights along with, well, a lot of padding.
That firms continue with this is quite understandable.
It gives their people the insights and tools they need to start new conversations with clients, prospects and intermediaries, and helps strengthen those relationships.
It is a powerful way to demonstrate a firm’s expertise and culture, putting individuals and teams under the spotlight. It brings ownership and pride to those creating and sharing these insights, and is often the foundation for media relations programmes.
Some professional services firms, it could be argued, increasingly look like publishing businesses. But unlike a publishing business, there is rarely anyone in the role of an editor.
Marketers will, of course, help create these insights, often writing them and certainly ‘editing’ content before it is published and shared. But that is a very different function from an editor.
Where is the controlling voice that decides what clients, prospects, intermediaries and future talent need to see, read or listen to? For most firms, that role simply doesn’t exist.
That is perhaps because of the inherent tension between marketing and the subject matter experts. How can anyone in marketing really understand what has taken a lawyer or accountant 10 or 20 years to learn?
It has seen many firms adopt a spray-and-pray approach with their content. If we through enough of this stuff out there, surely some will stick. It doesn’t.
It is time for firms to appoint an editor.
That role should sit firmly in your comms team. They know what themes are likely to best land with clients and the most impactful channels. Importantly, they have that wider perspective of how content will sit alongside other marketing campaigns and programmes.
A firm’s comms and PR team are not just there to create and shape content and media campaigns; they are the guardians of how a firm is perceived. And in a world where we are bombarded with hundreds, if not thousands, of messages daily, firms need to ensure their content counts.
It is, after all, the editors and not the individual writers who decide what runs in their print and broadcast outlets. And so it should be for most professional services firms.
Matt Baldwin is the co-founder of Coast Communications, a media relations and communications consultancy.
