Are you considering ramping up your digital media campaign and content marketing efforts? Excellent. Content marketing, in a nutshell, is all about creating and sharing material that doesn’t explicitly promote your brand but rather is intended to stimulate interest in you and your offering. And EVERYBODY’s doing it to a certain degree.

At the core of content marketing lies self-publishing. This essay will briefly explain the concept of self-publishing and strongly advise you to take it seriously. To read about my experience as chief content officer please visit the about page.

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(i) What is self-publishing

Merriam-Webster gives us this definition:

publishing

noun | pub·lish·ing | \ˈpə-bli-shiŋ\

: the business or profession of the commercial production and issuance of literature, information, musical scores or sometimes recordings, or art · newspaper publishing · software publishing

Plain-to-see, publishing refers to a commercial effort, and is typically organized as a business or profession. Publishing, in its traditional form, is for publishers – organizations with a business model focused on publishing.

But what about organizations engaged in publishing aimed at supporting other activities at the core of their business? Enter: self-publishing.

Today, many if not most businesses are engaged in self-publishing. The Information Age has given us access to inexpensive publishing tools and has caused a paradigm shift from direct marketing to inbound (content) marketing.

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(ii) Why you need self-publishing

Not because everybody else’s doing it, but because clients and prospects are looking for information and expecting engagement; they want to know you are a leader in your field; they want to feel you have the ability to solve their problems; and they need this knowledge before they email you or pick up the phone.

Aficionados mention Red Bull, John Deere and LEGO as prime examples of content marketing pioneers and I suggest you look it up if you want to learn more.

The legal sector, for its unique characteristics, is slow to adapt. In Israel, only a handful of law firms have self-publishing operations worth mentioning, while HFN stands out as the leader of the pack.

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(iii) How to make it work

Digital media is cheap and content creation much faster and less expensive than hard copy ever was. But most content marketing efforts by professional service firms fail because (a) they can’t plan ahead; (b) won’t go the extra mile to nail the editorial; (c) detest expenses without evident ROI; bust mostly (d) are under the misconception they are better off doing it themselves.

That’s wrong. You’re not better off yourself. Content has to be related to as a product your firm produces, and not as an inconvenience we must learn to live with. In the attention free-for-all you need to make every second of exposure count.

You rarely get a second chance to make a first impression.

Everything that is published in professional context – at resolutions so fine to include your employees’ LinkedIn updates and tweets – can be treated is marketing material, used to generate leads and move clients down the sales funnel. Hey! I do it and it works and there’s no reason your firm shouldn’t.

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(iv) Concentrate the effort

In the legal sector it’s commonplace for publishing efforts to be spread over several functions within the organization; the point of this essay was to evoke thought and contemplation with respect to the benefits of having a chief digital officer or editor-in-chief to handle your media. In-house or freelance.

Do let me know if you’d like to talk. Right now the game is wide open.