For nearly a decade, the State of Digital & Content Marketing Survey has focused on the information consumption attitudes, behaviors and tendencies of in-house counsel, paired with practical guidance for law firms who continually compete for greater share of voice among this audience.
To help firm marketers in that effort, in an era when content is fire and digital publishing technology is gasoline, we delve deeply into what makes effective content stand out from the noise: the formats, attributes, preference and other variables that in-house counsel find most valuable in the content they consume.
In 2018, we use this real-time audience insight to offer fresh guidance on how firms can continually sharpen their content strategies.
Key Points
A couple of key points to emerge from the survey:
- In-house counsel note that law firm content has not greatly improved in recent times;
- Time-poor in-house counsel consume and value from many forms of content, including firm-generated content, while placing greater trust and confidence in traditional media as sources of news and information.
Content Characteristics That Broke Through
The following is how they categorized content characteristics that attract them most frequently:
- Utility/Usefulness: 77% of in-house counsel say that utility, above all other attributes, attracts them to the content they consume most frequently.
- Timeliness: 68%
- Source: 56%
- Headline/Subject Line: 51%
- Length (short): 31%
- Author: 20%
- Graphics: 7%
- Visual appeal: 7%
- Length (long): 5%
- A Strong point of view: 4%. Greentarget points out this is an important element in utility (#1) and often a key driver of strong headlines and subject lines (#4)
