By Dan Pecchia
For accountants, lawyers and other advisory professionals, the hardest part of thought leadership isn’t a lack of expertise. It’s a lack of time and creative thinking. The prospect of conjuring a blog from thin air can feel like an unwelcome exercise of unbillable time.
But what if you don’t have to start from scratch?
The reality is that the seeds of excellent thought leadership are likely sitting in your “Sent” folder right now. The memos you write, the strategy emails you draft and the assessments you develop for clients are gold mines for great content. The heavy lifting of researching, analyzing and structuring that guidance is in many cases already done.
Here are five key concepts to keep in mind as you capitalize on the golden opportunity to convert real-world client communication into compelling thought leadership content that showcases your expertise to clients, search engines and answer engines.
1. Embrace the Built-In Relevance Guarantee
One of the biggest fears of developing a blog is, “Will anyone actually care about this?”
When you repurpose advice you’ve created for a client, that question is already answered. If a CEO or business owner just paid your fees to have you address this specific problem, it is virtually guaranteed that other leaders in your market are losing sleep over the exact same issue.
You aren’t guessing what the market wants to read. You have solid evidence.
2. Avoid the Confidentiality Trap
Client confidentiality is the bedrock of advisory services, which makes it an obvious hurdle when you look at repurposing real-world advice.
You can clear that hurdle by anonymizing and synthesizing your advice. You need to strip out identifying details, obviously. You can also change financial figures to percentages or general ranges and shift the industry slightly.
You can blend the facts of two or three similar client situations to create a composite case study that illustrates your point perfectly and doesn’t expose any sensitive information.
3. Zoom Out from the Micro to the Macro
Advice given to a single client is inherently narrow. To make it thought leadership, you have to broaden the lens.
To do that, move from the specific application to the broader implication. For example, if your original advice or memo covered how a specific property tax reassessment impacts a specific client warehouse, you might consider a thought leadership piece on the impact of property reassessments on regional distributors. Extract the universal principle from the specific problem.
4. Strip Away the Shorthand
When you work with a client for years, you develop a shorthand. You skip over foundational explanations because the client already knows the background.
If you merely copy and paste an explanation from a client email, a broader audience could get completely lost in the weeds of your industry jargon.
You can fix that. Read through your repurposed text with a beginner’s mind. Spell out the acronyms. Briefly explain the relevant tax code or legal statute before diving into your analysis of it.
You have to rebuild the bridge that gets the public reader to your expert conclusion.
5. Involve a Content Professional
The ultimate advantage of the “Sent Folder” strategy is that the hardest parts of content creation – identifying a relevant problem, researching the facts and formulating a point of view – are done. You have the raw material.
But let’s be honest: editing and polishing that material takes time and expertise you may not have.
This is where partnering with a content professional can pay massive dividends. Instead of spending your valuable, unbillable hours trying to translate your analysis into an engaging article or blog, you can securely hand off your insights.
A skilled writer can shape your raw expertise into a polished, accessible piece tailored for your audience. You’ll get to review and approve it but won’t have to labor over it.
Wrap-up: Stop Hoarding Your Advice
As an advisory professional, your expertise is your inventory. Don’t let your most brilliant insights die in a single email thread. By tapping into the advice you are already giving, you hold the blueprint for a massive library of thought leadership that can scale your regional reputation.
By involving a dedicated content pro, you’ll have more time to focus on the high-level billable work that generates those brilliant insights in the first place.
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Dan Pecchia is a content marketing leader and the founder and president of Pecchia Communications. His outbox has been a rich source for blogs he’s written over the years — including this one. Reach his inbox at dan@pecchiacomm.com.
