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And the Single Most Important Metric of All
We covered the topic of analytics on a recent episode of The Thought Leadership Project podcast, and a listener asked me a thought-provoking follow-up question: “If you could measure only one key performance indicator, what would it be?”
During the podcast conversation with my co-host Jay Harrington, we covered a variety of indices and both leading and lagging indicators of legal marketing efficacy, until I switched gears near the end and surprised Jay with a plot twist. This, in essence, framed the answer to the question of what I believe to be the most important metric of all.
What Gets Measured Gets Done
If you’re an attorney who doesn’t work closely with the marketing department, or one for whom the concept of marketing analytics is foreign, we should start at the beginning. What can be measured, and what metrics are your marketing partners following currently?
Categorically, there are all sorts of digital tracking tools and datasets available to legal marketers...those that measure:
Audience: How many people are we speaking to? These are quantitative measurements of, say, social media followers, email subscribers, podcast listeners, website visitors, etc.
Reach: With whom did we speak at a given time? Another quantitative metric is the number of people your marketing content is actually reaching. Analytics falling into this category include things like open rates on emails, downloads or plays of podcasts, video views, etc. These people may include your audience, but you may be also reaching outside of your audience, should an audience member share your LinkedIn post or forward your marketing email to a colleague. Or maybe someone just found your content via Google. The trick is converting that reach statistic into your audience count.
Impressions: Who might we have also impacted by our content? Sometimes, content is served to an audience, but no measurable action has been recorded (such as a video view, a blog click, a podcast listen, etc.). Perhaps not as quantifiable as an action taken, impressions can also have incremental impact simply by crossing someone’s path, appearing in a social media feed, or showing up in an article on a news platform. Such impressions reinforce the notion that you are generating thought-leadership content, sharing subject matter expertise and being tapped by the media for perspective, all to the elevation of your personal brand and reputation.
Engagement: Who are converting into fans? As members of your audience move further down your content funnel, they are moving down your sales funnel as well. These are the people who like a social media post, click on a link to your blog post via such a social share, offer a comment or reply online, click a link in the firm e-newsletter, subscribe to and review/rate your podcast, etc. It’s important for you as a business development professional to know who your most engaged audience members are, and perhaps even reach out to them strategically to convert that fandom into an actual conversation or nurture the relationship further.
Affinity: Who’s in the tribe? The consistently engaged are the audience members who open every email, click every link, subscribe to every RSS feed (blog, podcast, etc.), and follow or connect with you on all social media platforms. If you don’t understand who the most closely connected are to you and your content, you’re missing an opportunity to create a “short list” or hot file of the people to whom you should be personally reaching out.
Sentiment: How do people feel about the content I’m sharing? Sophisticated analytics tools like Hubspot, SproutSocial and others will even do a sentiment analysis of content you share—or mentions you receive—on social media and other public fora. If you want to know who your most ardent fans are among your audience or reach, sentiment analysis can be useful in identifying them (though not yet fully reliable, in my opinion).
Quantity vs. Quality, Meta vs. Micro
Keep in mind, data analytics on the top of the content funnel—or for the purpose of illustration, the top of my list above—are mostly quantitative metrics, meaning they measure numbers, not motivators. As you move further down my list, into engagement and sentiment, you start to get more qualitative in nature. You are assigning names to behaviors and following them (both the names and the behaviors) over time. But keep in mind, in most cases you are measuring activities and reactions, not necessarily understanding motivators or comprehending underlying thoughts and emotions.
Also, analytics tools that measure pure numbers are good as far as they go, but we caution against getting overly hung up on what we refer to as “vanity metrics”: follower count, website traffic, click rates, etc. Google Analytics, for example, is an abundance of quantitative data, but it’s difficult to know who your fans are among the data points. It might be tempting to “feel good” about high numbers of clicks and audience growth, as metadata (which is essentially what Google Analytics offers) will provide useful trendline observations, but very little actionable intelligence, specifically from a business development perspective.
Microdata, however—such as those provided by MailChimp, Hubspot, Salesforce, JD Supra, and many others—is where the true power of analytics comes in. More than simply knowing the numbers of Likes, clicks and page visits, we can now understand the actual people behind the clicks. We can assign these actual humans affinity scores, and even track their affinity growth over time. When it comes time to convert our marketing efforts into business development success, we can start with a list of our individuals who have the highest affinity scores.
One exercise that Jay Harrington recommends is doing an analysis of market density among your audience, as a way to protect against getting false signals from your quantitative analytics and ensuring more qualitative intelligence is baked into your analytics. If you, in your business development efforts, are targeting general counsel at auto suppliers, how many of your LinkedIn followers are such? Once you know, create to-dos and commitments to heighten that density by connecting more with those professionals on LinkedIn, reacting to or commenting on the content they share to earn some good will, join the LinkedIn groups and follow the trade media and organizations they belong to, and so on.
I Have the Data. Now What?
The purpose of capturing, reporting and analyzing data should not be the dopamine release you receive by seeing your numbers go up. Though that may do wonders for your vanity, what I recommend focusing on instead is campaign effectiveness. Too often, the numbers are reported, but little is done as a result of the intelligence gleaned.
As an attorney engaged in thought-leadership marketing, you should request all of the analytics referenced above. My rule of thumb is to monitor monthly, respond quarterly. Monthly, you will make note of peaks and valleys, record obvious successes, reference surprising disappointments, and so on. On a quarterly basis, you will look at three months of qualitative and quantitative analytics, and create an action plan that addresses both the positive and negative data points:
This article had higher numbers; let’s write more content about that.
This podcast episode had a higher completion rate than most; let’s write a correlating blog post on the topic.
This article received a lot of attention and comments on LinkedIn; let’s do a short video or infographic and use that to re-publish the piece a second time.
This article had a very low click rate in our newsletter; maybe the content needs to be simplified or emphasized differently...or maybe the headline belied its value. Should we try again a different way with the same content, or discard the topic altogether?
In other words, don’t just take the briefing; actually convert data into intelligence and then use that intelligence to optimize your marketing efforts and convert more audience members into fans...and more fans into clients.
The Single Most Important Metric
Now that I’ve taught you how to do it...stop! I say that facetiously, but not entirely. I truly believe that the single most effective way to develop business as an attorney is to establish a reputation as a thought leader; and the best way to earn that reputation is to consistently and credibly provide subject matter expertise into a narrowly defined audience segment. By definition, a narrow audience will yield smaller numbers. But that should not matter, if the goal is to develop business and not to become an Internet celebrity.
Furthermore, quantitative metrics are snapshots in time. Very few high-level legal engagements come in snapshots that trigger immediate action on social media. Instead, reputation is earned over time, trust is granted once reputation has been supported and validated, and transactions are discussed only amongst those we trust and like. That’s simply too heavy a pull for one blog post or even a highly engaged social media post to pull off.
Instead, I would measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts by one metric:
One year in, can I be credibly regarded as an expert in the space I occupy? And in three years, can I be credibly regarded as a/the preeminent voice in that space?
If the answer is yes, you have risen to the mantle of thought leader. Thought leaders command respect, attention, and yes...even bigger engagements and higher fees.
So, definitely: Monitor monthly analytics, and create 90-day action plans based on qualitative and quantitative intelligence. But measure your overall campaign performance by a single analytic: Am I a thought leader?
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