If you want to build a following through your thought leadership content, you need to respect the people consuming that content. Here are five ways you’re doing the opposite.
Building an audience by publishing thought leadership content isn’t just about sharing the knowledge, wisdom, and insights you have.
It’s about presenting that knowledge and wisdom and those insights in ways that are relevant, valuable, and compelling to your audience, and that make it easy for them to consume that content.
In other words, it’s about R-E-S-P-E-C-T-ing the people consuming your content.
If you don’t, they’re not going to stick around to finish consuming the piece of content they’re currently consuming, and they’re not going to come back to your content in the future.
Here are five ways you might be disrespecting the people consuming your content.
Lack of “signpost subheads”
Did you notice how the subhead above tipped you off to what I’m going to cover in this section?
Did you notice how the subheads throughout this post make it easy to skim this post and help you quickly determine what I’m talking about and whether you find it interesting enough to read the post closely?
That’s the power of what I call “signpost subheads.”
It’s not fun to consume a piece of content where you don’t know what direction the content is going. It’s equally unpleasant when you’re faced with long paragraphs of text without first getting an indication of what those paragraphs are covering.
Signpost subheads are a sign of respect to the consumers of your thought leadership content.
Individually, they serve as directional signs that tip off the consumers of your content about what they can expect to read. Taken together, they provide a roadmap to your consumers of where your content will take them so they can skim them to determine whether they want to read what you wrote from start to finish.
I’m shocked by how rarely attorneys use “signpost subheads” in their thought leadership content. If you don’t use subheads to introduce paragraphs or sections, you’re disrespecting your audience. You’re making it hard for them to consume your content, which invites them to ignore your content in the future.
You’re not using whitespace correctly
Even if you use signpost subheads, if you have massive paragraphs in between those subheads that are a pain to read, you’re disrespecting your audience.
I don’t know about you, but when I see a bulky block of text, I think to myself, “Ugh, really? I’m going to have to read this big, bulky thing? Nah, I’m good. I’m going to skim it, or I might skip the whole darn thing entirely.”
Avoiding bulky blocks of text is easy: Use white space creatively. Use white space to give the consumers of your content a chance to proverbially catch their breath as they move through your content.
As you’ve surely noticed if you’ve consumed any content online recently, you need not have paragraphs that are 5 to 7 sentences long.
Actually, you *should* not have paragraphs that long.
Whenever possible—which is to say 98% of the time—your paragraphs should be 2 to 3 sentences long. You should even toss in one-sentence paragraphs, like the one directly above this paragraph, when the flow of your content calls for it.
When you use white space creatively, you’re respecting your audience because you’re making it easier for them to consume your content and digest it.
You’re not laying the groundwork or the context for the points you’re making
Have you ever read a piece of thought leadership content concerning a recent court decision where the author talks about the court’s holding but the holding references a fact the author didn’t mention earlier on? It’s confusing and it breaks your concentration.
It’s also disrespectful.
If you as an author don’t properly lay out facts early on in a thought leadership piece that provide the foundation for the point you’re going to make later, you’re making it hard for the consumers of your content to follow along. For example, failing to provide a primer on a statute makes it difficult to follow a court’s decision regarding that statute, especially if the court’s analysis in very much in the weeds.
If you’re not providing information that makes it easy for the consumers of your content to follow your discussion all the way through, you’re going to confuse them.
If you’re confusing your audience, you’re disrespecting them.
You’re burying the lede
On a related point, you’re disrespecting the people consuming your content if you’re “burying the lede.” That is, you’re waiting until the very end, or at least the middle, of your content to mention the relevance to your consumers of the topic you’re discussing.
As a result, you’re not making it easy for them to suss out why the topic is relevant to them, why they should consume that piece of content, or what they’ll learn from it.
You see this often when someone is discussing a legal development, such as a recent court decision or a piece of legislation. They tend to bury at the end of their 1300-word thought leadership article why they think the development matters.
That’s disrespectful. You need not fully explain your takeaways at the beginning of an article, but you should at least provide a headline-type explanation that piques your readers’ interests.
Why should readers have to spend any more time than is necessary determining whether they want to consume a piece of your content and what they’ll learn from doing so?
You’re not transitioning smoothly from one thought, sentence, paragraph, or section to the next
I find it fascinating that so much legal thought leadership content out there has abrupt transitions from one thought, sentence, paragraph, or section to the next. They remind me of those harsh transitions on short-form vertical videos on social media.
There are few, if any, smooth segues. That’s another way of disrespecting the consumers of your content. You should be liberally using segues.
From thought to thought.
From sentence to sentence.
From paragraph to paragraph.
From section to section.
They’re so easy to come up with, yet they make a huge difference in the readability of your thought leadership content.
Segues like “But the court wasn’t done,” “If that wasn’t enough,” or “In a similar vein,” signals to the consumers of your content that you’re finished talking about a particular topic and you’re now moving on to the next one. Or, that you’re going to keep on talking about the topic, so they should prepare for more information about it.
Segues make your thought leadership content flow in a silky smooth way.
That makes it easy for the consumers of your content to follow your train of thought, which makes it easy for them to digest your content, which makes it easy for them to enjoy your content, which makes them want to come back to consume your future content.
A little respect can go a long way
If you want to be seen as a thought leader, you need people to actually consume your thought leadership content. But nobody likes to be disrespected when they try to do so.
If you’re disrespecting consumers of your thought leadership by regularly doing any of the five things above, you’re not going to build an audience.
But if you do respect your audience, they’ll thank you for it by becoming loyal consumers of your content — and, perhaps, clients, referral sources, and even friends and colleagues.
Thinking about bringing on an outside writer to help your law firm strategize and create compelling thought-leadership marketing and business development content? Click here to schedule a 30-minute Content Strategy Audit to learn if collaborating with an outside writer is the right move for you and your firm.