The power of published articles

We started this week with a marketing meeting and one of our lawyers shared that she received an enquiry through someone who read one of her articles she published on the firm’s website in 2017. The enquiry turned into actual work and the team is busy with this matter for this new client.  

The client most likely did a Google search looking for specific key words and landed on the article on the firm’s website. He then found out that the lawyer in question is highly specialised in exactly the area he was looking for. It clearly was a match at first sight, he didn’t hesitate, looked at the lawyers profile on the website for her contact details and reached out to her straight away.  

This is just one success story and there are so many more. If you look at the website statistics of any professional services firm, the stats will be a proof that next to individual’s profiles, the content i.e. blog posts, articles, news, updates, etc. are the most frequently visited pages of the website. This is for a reason. People look for content, they want to understand how things work. The number of times I use YouTube or simply search on Google to find papers, reports, stats and other research to back my plans and ideas is other evidence that publications work.  

People look things up and it is very likely they will find information on the web but if it is not the information that you published it may be your competitors’. If they could find your information instead, they may actually reach out to you like they did to one of my colleagues.  

The good thing is, that those articles do not have to be very long. In fact, the one my colleague wrote was only 750 words and they can be even shorter. Share your voice, let them know how you feel about things that matter to you, show your audience and potential clients that you are an expert and contribute to the knowledge already out there.  

If you need expertise help in any field, could be medical or fixes in the house, you may want to self-diagnose first before consulting a specialist. You look up your symptoms or problems online and Google will spit out the answers. Following the satisfaction you will get from these answers, you will look at experts who could help you out. These could be doctors for medical problems or a handy man to help with fixes in the house. You want to be assured that they are good at their job and their publications which includes their knowledge about their area of expertise will help you gain that confidence.  

You can keep the ideas and your knowledge in your head, but it has the potential to benefit so many people that it really is worth considering just sharing it and it may even lead to potential new clients.