Having a real, no-kidding, content expert on hand is a competitive advantage for any professional services firm. Not only does it make the marketing you’re already doing vastly better, but it also, to quote Jonah Hill’s character in Moneyball, it “opens up all kinds of interesting possibilities.”
In his classic book The Mind of the Strategist, Kenichi Ohmae wrote, “The strategist’s method is very simply to challenge the prevailing assumptions with a single question: Why?” This is what I do with content strategy. I ensure that clients think through and plan around who they are seeking to reach, how, when and most importantly, why. This alone makes content vastly more effective.
When it comes to actually producing content, I guarantee I can outwrite almost everyone in your firm. How? Why? Because it’s all I do. Six or eight hours a day, for years and years and years, all I did was work at becoming better at putting words together. My stuff is more organized, more energetic, more interesting, just more. I work faster. I hit deadlines. Again, this is simply because I do nothing else.
I’m also a bargain. Whatever my hourly rate works out to, it’s almost certainly less than what your most junior lawyer bills at. She can either be billing at her rate and generating revenue, or she can be struggling over a blog post and not generating revenue. The math is pretty simple. When you subtract what I charge from what your lawyer bills at, the economics become kind of obvious.
Finally, having me available means that almost any marketing project you want to undertake becomes possible. An awful lot of things my clients want to do to market themselves don’t happen because they can’t find someone who can write it — well, on time, and without being taken away from their real work for six days.
I solve that problem. Want to create a microsite for a practice group? Bringing in a new lateral who could use some ghostwriting? Want to launch a blog, but don’t know who will actually write it? I will. Create the site, hire the lateral, launch the blog. I’ll take care of the hardest part — the writing. And all this stuff you formerly couldn’t realistically do, you now can.