Ep. 20 - Is Your Content Killing Your Message? – How to Create Content That Actually Works

In this episode of The Law Firm Growth Professor Podcast, I’m pulling back the curtain on a mistake I see far too many law firms make and one I’ve made myself in the past: relying on content that looks polished but completely misses the mark.

I talk about why even the best SEO in the world can’t save content that doesn’t connect, and how to fix it. Whether you’re writing your own blog posts or outsourcing everything to a content agency, this episode will help you figure out what your message should be doing and what it absolutely shouldn’t. I also share my personal strategies for creating content that entertains, educates, and invites your audience to take the next step.

I’ll walk you through how I think about tone, emotion, storytelling, and the subtle difference between being informative and being unforgettable. And if you’ve ever wondered whether your content is working as hard as you are, this episode will give you the clarity (and confidence) to course-correct.

In this episode, I share:

• How I match content tone to my ideal client base

• The biggest traps lawyers fall into with writing and how to avoid them

• Why emotion matters just as much as logic in law firm marketing

• What I look for in a content writer and why voice and values matter

• How I’ve made my content a true extension of who I am as a lawyer and human being

If you’ve ever felt like your content is falling flat, or if you’re not sure what kind of voice your firm should have online, this one’s for you.

Want to learn more about how our agency can help your law firm grow? Speak with John Rizvi ☎️

Transcript

John Rizvi 0:00

This is Pod Populi, podcast for the people. Professor, that's my name. Hi, and welcome back. I'm John Rizvi, the Law Firm Growth Professor. And for those rejoining me, I'm glad to see you again. For our first-time listeners, it's great to have you here. Now, in this podcast, I share the strategies for growth that have worked for me in growing my law firm from a startup with just me, a laptop, and a cell phone operating out of a spare bedroom to where we are today, a team of 60 professionals generating over 10 million a year in revenue from our 10,000 square foot headquarters in Coral Springs. Let me get straight to the point here by saying something I've said at least a thousand times before. Content is king. If your content isn't on point and doesn't serve a purpose for your site visitors, it doesn't matter how crisp your SEO is. Remember, there are 2,600 different algorithm modules and 14,000 signals on Google alone. Even assuming you could, there's no point in even trying to hit all of them in your site's content unless it's pulling its own weight. So for this episode, we're going to step mostly away from SEO considerations entirely and just focus on your content and what it should be doing. Like everything else, writing for an audience is a skill. There's very few people who are just naturally good at it. It's a craft that takes time, effort, and dedication to perfect. If you've ever learned to play a musical instrument, the same concepts are in play there. Having a natural talent is great, but it doesn't matter if you don't practice and develop it. Besides, drafting legal briefs and notices of judgment are a whole different skill set than writing for an audience. The objectives are completely different and you have more freedom with your format and tone when writing for a general audience than when writing for the courts, or in my case, the patent office. But if you don't know what you're trying to say or how to say it in a way that hooks your audience, you're out of luck. The good news is you don't have to be. Now before we get into all that, let me throw out a disclaimer. Good content is largely a matter of perception and intent. What works and doesn't work for one law firm may be the exact opposite for another. Different areas of legal practice require different scopes and narrative approaches. The emotional range that's acceptable for content in patent law is different than family law, and that's different than personal injury law. In the same way, your content should reflect your ideal client. In my own practice, I'm targeting entrepreneurs and inventors. These are people who read a lot of science fiction and science-related stuff, and they're comfortable with $5 words, so I can use bigger words a little more liberally. In family or estate planning law, you might want to take a more inclusive approach depending on the client base that you're trying to attract. If you're going after high net worth professionals and say you focus on doctors and lawyers and engineers or scientists, well writing for that audience might make sense. On the other hand, if you're in a small town and the clients you represent are mostly blue-collar, you need to write to that audience. So let's shift gears here for a minute, since I'm on the subject. What shouldn't your content do? This is a huge question too many people don't ask. They know what they think their content should do or is doing, but they never think about the flip side of that, much less use it as an acid test on whether or not they hit the mark or not. For some advice on this, I reached out to a writer and SEO specialist I've come to know well, Jericho Vane, and he had this to say. Usually this is pretty easy. You just add words like not or don't into your intended message, and if it's a positive one, or you lop those words off if it's a negative one. Black becomes white, up is down, north becomes south, whatever. This gives me a good idea of what aspects of the topic I want to avoid or downplay. Next, I need to know what the purpose is. Whatever it is, I should always be trying to entertain and educate the intended reader. So the information I'm offering sticks in their mind. But am I informing or am I trying to sell something? If I'm trying to inform, uh an unsubtle sales pitch will kill the content. If I'm trying to sell, how much information risks turning the reader's attention and desire to buy off? Too much entertaining waters down the message, but too much information doesn't resonate emotionally with the audience and can murder the message. From there, I think about the target audience. Am I writing for people in finance and insurance or hard sciences? Or am I writing for Joe Sixpack? What's funny, interesting, entertaining, and relevant to a 50-something female attorney may be dead boring for a guy in his 20s working in construction. So I've got to figure out how to bridge that gap because playing to the wrong crowd means the content won't land with the right one. Even if they don't click anything or do anything other than read the content, if I can capture their eyeballs, I can set up my own little rent-free tent in their brain for later. So I try not to make my content too niche or specialized for the broadest possible appeal. Finally, I run through the content and do another opposite check. If I invert the message, is it just as strong, clear, and resonant? If that's the case, I've nailed it. And if not, I've got a clunky transition or a joke that falls flat or a passage that makes no sense in the context of the broader article when I look at it in this mirror. It needs to be fixed or be gone. I don't have forty, sixty, a hundred thousand words to get the reader's attention. So I can't afford to waste real estate on the page just to get the point across. So let me recap here. What content should not do. First, your content shouldn't leave any questions in the reader's mind about what your topic or intent is. Next, your content shouldn't entertain at the expense of informing. And you shouldn't try to sell at the expense of educating. Also, your content shouldn't be so specialized or narrow in scope or tone that it loses broad audience appeal. Finally, remember you're not Charles Dickens or Ernest Hemingway, and your website visitors don't expect you to be. Your content shouldn't waste a lot of the user readers' time getting to the point. This sounds hard, but as Nathaniel Hawthorne once said, easy reading is damn hard writing. So from this list of shouldn'ts, let's pivot into what your content should do. Your content should entertain, educate, and invite. I want to really break these down because if you hit these points, you're on your way to delivering content that does the job. But first, a digression about emotion. As attorneys, there's no getting away from logic and reasoning and knowing the statutes and the laws and the codes, and we need to know them cold. That's expected of us. However, remember to be a human being. This needs to be first and foremost, and a lot of lawyers become so clinical in their writing that they forget to show the entire range of emotions. There's no reason that your writing can't show anger, fear, sadness, loss, joy, or excitement. It can and should reflect empathy, and when appropriate, disgust. Yes, it's true that our clients need to see us be able to work from logic, knowledge, and the law, and not make important legal and strategic decisions from emotion. We do need to be able to maintain the cool one degree of separation distance from the emotional resonance that our clients are experiencing. However, if we go too far in this realm in our marketing, it can actually hurt us. That's why I'm not afraid to lean into my emotions a bit. When a client's patent application is rejected, for example, I share their frustration and their sadness. And when one gets approved, I feel their excitement, their joy, and I'm not afraid to show it. After all, even though it is my work that got them there and convinced the patent office that their idea is novel, the novel idea is their idea. And that's ultimately what the patent grant is based upon. So in all of my marketing and my writing, there's no exception to this. I don't mind being a little goofy or showing that I have a sense of humor. I'm not afraid to show off my uh engineering geeky side or my love of numbers and statistics and spreadsheets. That helps me with marketing and that also helps uh in patent law. But I share my hobbies and I also share non-work-related passions so that clients get a sense of who I am outside of the office. For me, I love growing tropical fruit trees, and I talk about gardening, and I have two pet goats and chickens, and uh I talk about my pet swan often. These things make me more than just a stack of legal texts in a gray suit. They make me more real to my clients instead of just a mouthpiece. They make me memorable. So how do we elicit emotion? The first step is to entertain. Tell an anecdote, crack a joke, even if it's at your own expense. And entertainment is not always humor. Sometimes it's telling a story, but don't just tell the story. Put yourself back in time and actually relive the story. Talk about a time when you didn't get the result that you were after, and talk about how you felt and what you learned from it. Get their attention because nothing catches attention like a story, and you can tie that to your practice and you can educate at the same time. And if you do this, you're more likely to keep people coming back for more. And as many of you know, I teach classes in patent and IP law at Nova Law School. I'm an adjunct professor, and intellectual property law fascinates me, but there are parts of it that are extremely tedious and dull. And if it's a slog for me, how much worse is it for my second and third year law students? Many of them are graduating and have law school senioritis. They're not even sure they want to practice uh intellectual property law. So the duller the topic naturally is, I find that the more entertaining I have to make it for my students' sake and my own. It's not a great look to be falling asleep at the whiteboard because I'm trying to teach this one important fundamental of IP law that, however necessary it is, even bores me to tears. So I have to find ways to liven it up and inject emotion, some resonance into the topic and into that matter. This brings me to the next point. Now that we're entertaining our readers, we've set ourselves up to educate them. Informing isn't the best word here. The news informs us to some degree anyway. We need to go deeper than simply informing. We need to leave our readers with a sense, or our viewers, with a sense that they've gotten some new knowledge, a new skill, or at least a fresh point of view that they can apply to their own situation. This could be something as simple as a different way of looking at estate planning, or as complex as what happens when your will is challenged in probate. The goal here is to give your audience something that they can take with them with no expectations except that they will use it well. At this point, we can extend an invitation. Maybe it's inviting your visitors to leave a comment, share a link, or set up a consultation. We're not asking them to, we're offering them the opportunity. Sometimes asking comes off as pushy and salesy, and it can be a big turnoff to many people. But if you frame the ask as an invitation, that changes the dynamic and makes it much more likely that they're going to do it. We're still getting to the same intended outcome, just taking a slightly more scenic route. And if you and you don't have to do this at the end of every single piece of content, you don't necessarily have to have a call to action on everything that you create. Although a lot of marketing agencies tell you that everything has to have a call to action. But if you do this on every single piece of content and you do it all of the time, even if it's really good, it comes off like a quid pro quo and you'll turn many people off. If your content is good, people will come back for more and more, and as long as some of your content has a call to action, they will reach out to you. You spent hundreds of words making yourself appear likable, relatable, and knowledgeable. If every time you do this, you turn around at the end and stick your hand out, what you've really done in those remaining 15 words is help dismantle some of the rapport that you've developed. You have to balance this, and I'm not saying to never have a call to action, but it doesn't have to be at the end of every single piece of content that you produce. At this point, you're probably feeling like there's a retooling of the evil overlord list, specifically for writers. That's not the idea here. Although I personally like the evil overlord list, and I wish more writers adhere to it. The goal here is to get you thinking about your content from your reader's perspective so you can make it better. But here's the thing, chances are you don't do your own content writing. Why would you? You're busy, you've got a law firm to run, clients to manage, and a thousand administrative headaches that you're dealing with. So you hire a content creation specialist. Maybe you give it a brief glance and then you tell them to get it up on the website while you move on to the next time bomb that just hit your desk. You what I'm saying is you need to go deeper than that. Unless you're sure that whoever's creating your website content has it dialed in the way you need it, you need to make a point of giving it all a hard, solid look and then really interrogating it to make sure it's doing the heavy lifting that it's supposed to do. Not everything is going to hit, and that's fine. But you need to be able to trust whoever's doing your content creation, whether it's you or someone else, that they're going to be able to consistently deliver quality work. So how do you tell if somebody does quality work? One obvious way is to look for a resume. Writers with a diverse range of publication credits are more likely to be able to take on more and different types of content. But it's even better if you have someone with content creation and freeform writing credits to their name. SEO agencies tend to like having people like this on staff because they have flexibility and range. They understand things like tone, emotional temperature, pacing, and messaging in a way that a novice writer probably doesn't. Best of all, they're more likely to be able to effectively mimic your voice when creating content. Even if they turn out the occasional flop, they're likely to hit a lot more often than they miss. And that's good. Another way to is to ask around, perhaps even start with your own team, your own staff, to see if they have an interest or know someone that would be a good fit for writing. In some ways, this is even better because they already have the inside track on how your firm works and who your ideal clients are, who you have on staff, who has the time. Think about it. Who could that be? The ability to create content, if it's there on your team, that's excellent. And find someone that matches your needs. Now you could ask them for samples or a portfolio, although it's unlikely that most people will have that at their desk and just ready to whip it out. They may need some time to uh compile a list of their best writing. Or instead of outsourcing, you could do it yourself. No one will ever know your firm or what you're looking for in your clients as well as you do. That makes you the world's foremost expert authority on your law firm and its needs. And this is an immense advantage. Major pitfall here, of course, is time. If you're busy running a firm, you probably don't have the time or the energy to spare to create your own content. And even if you do, you may find it hard to, as they say in writing, murder your darlings. So uh there's many seminars and authors that have advised this throughout the last 125 years or so. The point is, you've got some points here and some options here. Which one or ones will make the most sense for you and which is something good for your firm is something only you can answer. But where do you go from here? In my experience, the best results come from working with a single writer who really understands you as a person or and a professional. This means they take the time to get to know you, to get in your head and hopefully your heart. They want to understand what drives you and your firm so they can translate that into content that attracts the clients that you're looking for. Now, I'm not saying you can't get great results from a team or an entire staff of writers. Sometimes that can be a good thing. Writers do get burned out writing about the same things in the same tone over and over again. They do need a break, they need a rest, or they want a change of pace or scene. And having a lot of different voices can sometimes be a good thing because it mixes up the tone of your content and allows for different perspectives on the same topics. The problem, of course, is that the that variance of tone and style and voice, it can throw your readers off. And it can be dangerous when you're trying to create a unified, seamless content program for your website and your social media. Now, you could create a style guide for your firm's content that all your writers have to follow, but that puts you back in the position of having to manage the content at every step. And if you're going to do that, sometimes it's better to just do it yourself. One of the hardest parts about creating content for your firm is there's so much you have to take on faith. You have to trust your writing team to know you and your firm well enough to deliver. You have to believe that they're doing everything they can to get potential clients to email or call. And you have to know that there are going to be growing pains, bumps in the road, and even some belly flops before you and your team get everything dialed in and start seeing the results that you're looking for. Before we wrap this up, I want to hear from you about how your content creation has been going. Has it been easy or has it been a constant fight? Have you had any major wins or significant losses? And what did you learn from them? Do you have any tips, tricks, or suggestions that I have might have missed in this episode that you want to share from your own experience? Most of all, what do you think is the most important component of content creation? And how's it working for you and your firm? Once again, I'm John Rizvey, the Law Firm Growth Professor. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd like to invite you to like, subscribe, and be sure to share this content with your colleagues and other attorneys. Thanks for tuning in today, and I'll see you next time. So when a new idea pops into your brain of the patent professor, that's my name. I'm a law school professor. An engineer too. I think that is fun. If the patent company says your idea is not new, that's just a devil cut, right? So when a new idea pops into your brain of the patent professor, that's my name. That's cool.