Thought leadership can do more than help you market yourself and build your book of business. It can make you a better networker.
There’s a transformative benefit to regularly producing thought leadership content that no one talks about.
When you consistently produce thought leadership content—whether in the form of the written word, videos, or podcasts—you’re not just building your visibility and your prominence for the purposes of building your book of business, you’re actually transforming your ability to connect with people when you network.
In other words, regularly producing thought leadership can make you a better networker.
Here are five reasons why.
Regularly producing thought leadership can make you a better networker because you’ll have sharpened your communications skills
When you consistently create content, you’re consistently organizing your thoughts and articulating them clearly. The more frequently you do these things, the better you will get at them.
And, when you get better at organizing and articulating your thoughts when you’re creating thought leadership content, you’ll also get better doing both when you’re chatting with people, no matter the situation.
Whether it’s a quick chat at a social event or a deep dive during an industry conference, you’ll have trained yourself to clearly articulate thoughts you’ve organized. You’ll seem more intelligent and engaging to the people you’re talking to, which will make them want to continue chatting with you, which makes for a better, more meaningful networking conversation and connection.
Regularly producing thought leadership can make you a better networker because you’ll have developed deep knowledge relevant to your professional contacts
When you regularly produce thought leadership content, you’re necessarily staying up to date on, and researching, legal developments and industry developments relevant to your clients, referral sources, and perhaps other professional contacts.
Naturally, this makes you more informed, and I’d argue more engaging, when you chat with past, current, and prospective clients and referral sources (as well as other professional contacts).
You’ll always have something to say about the issues they’re dealing with and the topics they’re discussing because you’ve almost certainly covered some aspects of those issues and topics recently in the thought leadership content you’ve produced, or you’re at least aware of them based on the research you’ve done and media outlets/information sources you’re monitoring.
Regularly producing thought leadership can make you a better networker because you’ll become a more confident and composed networker
By having to regularly organize your thoughts and clearly articulate them, and by continuously being up to date and educated on topics relevant to clients, referral sources, and other professional contacts, you should get a boost in your confidence and feel more composed when you’re networking.
A more confident and composed you will come across as more dynamic and more charismatic to the people you’re networking with, which should make you a more effective networker because more people will want to chat you up.
Who doesn’t want to chat up dynamic and charismatic people at networking events?!
Regularly producing thought leadership can make you a better networker because you’ll become a master icebreaker
Once again, by having to regularly organize your thoughts and clearly articulate them, and by continuously being up to date and educated on topics relevant to clients, referral sources, and other professional contacts, you’ll be able to easily initiate new conversations, or join existing ones, because you’ll be in a position to discuss a relevant topic, or offer valuable insights, which will help you more quickly break the ice when networking.
Obviously, you’re not going to (nor should you) start a conversation by giving a lecture about a topic you just published thought leadership about. That’s a great way to lose the interest of people you’re talking with and make them run away.
But, within the first few minutes of speaking to someone, as the conversation moves to an issue they’re dealing with or trends they’re seeing, you can most likely connect the conversation to a topic you’ve covered recently in thought leadership content or that you became aware of in the process of researching and planning a piece of content, which helps you break the ice and start or keep conversations going with networking contacts.
Regularly producing thought leadership can make you a better networker because you’ll become a better storyteller
When you regularly produce thought leadership content about how you’ve helped particular clients with their legal or business issues, you collect war stories you can tell (without divulging privileged or confidential information) when you’re networking with people who or whose organizations might have similar issues to those you’ve helped your clients with previously.
Even when you don’t have war stories to share, regularly producing this type of thought leadership will give you a collection of examples you’ll be comfortable discussing (again, without divulging privileged or confidential information) that show the people you’re networking with that you are knowledgeable and wise about the work you do and the issues you help your clients resolve.
You’ll be in a position to easily connect dots on the fly between the issues your clients, referral sources, and other professional contacts are discussing and what you’ve helped your clients with because you’ve developed a database in your mind of stories and examples you can pull from quickly because you’ve previously created content about them.
The hidden benefit of consistent thought leadership production
Regularly producing thought leadership content is how you build your prominence, your reputation, and your personal brand, which could help you develop client relationships and build a book of business.
But it can also help you become a more impressive and effective networker, which is an equally potent way for you to achieve each one of those goals.
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.