If you want to write a Year in Review thought leadership article that builds your authority, avoid doing these five things.
Each year, as November turns into December and December turns into January, attorneys who serve clients in particular industries start thinking about writing “Year in Review” thought leadership articles focused on what happened in those industries that year.
Like everything in life, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things. Here are five WRONG ways to write a Year in Review thought leadership article.
First, your Year in Review thought leadership article addresses a general industry audience
It’s not enough to merely narrow the focus of your Year in Review article to a particular industry. Go one step further.
Focus the article on members of a particular industry audience, namely, decision makers within the industry who would hire you and your colleagues. For example, “Five Things Healthcare GCs Should Have Learned in [YEAR].”
By doing so, you position yourself and your colleagues as a resource for that audience who can help them handle the legal and business issues they face.
You might think identifying the members of the audience that you’re talking to will discourage some past, current, and potential clients who aren’t in that audience group from reading that article.
You almost certainly won’t.
First, people are curious creatures. Taking my example from above, if you were a mid-level or senior in-house attorney at a healthcare company, wouldn’t you want to know what the people above you should be aware of? It would benefit you and your career path to learn this information.
Even if you weren’t an attorney, if any of your work at a healthcare company fell under the supervision of a GC, you’d likely be interested in learning about what they should know in order to get a sense of how developments in a year might impact you.
Second, I said you should narrow your article’s focus to a particular audience, but I didn’t say the audience has to be narrow. You can narrow your article to “executives,” “in-house attorneys,” “board members,” “leaders,” and other audiences that are broad.
The key is that you’re telegraphing that you’re speaking to a particular group of people, which will cause members of that group to say to themselves, “Hey, this article is meant for me. Maybe I should check it out.”
Second, your Year in Review thought leadership article discusses events and developments chronologically
Your Year in Review article is a service to your audience. It should distill for them all of the important events or developments that occurred in a year, and/or the lessons that they should have learned from them.
But, as importantly, it should also educate them about which of those events/developments/lessons were most impactful.
Walking through those events/developments/lessons in chronological order won’t get that job done.
Instead, you should show off your knowledge and wisdom about the industry and legal and business issues within it by discussing the events, developments, and lessons in some order—either counting up or down, starting or ending with what you think was the most important event, development, or lesson.
When you do this, you’re doing the hard work for your audience. You’re helping them make sense of the events and developments of the past year. And, you’re showing off your and your colleagues’ knowledge and wisdom about the industry and the legal and business issues industry participants face because you’re synthesizing a year’s worth of events and developments and putting them in context—both with respect to the industry overall and each other.
You’re inviting the audience to allow your judgment (about which events and developments were most important) to be an indicator of your authority on all things industry-related.
Third, your Year in Review thought leadership article skips past important details
The whole point of your Year in Review article is to explain the relevance of a handful of events and developments that took place over the course of the past year.
For your audience to understand the significance of those events and developments, you’ll need to remind them of the details of both. After all, you’ll be talking about events and developments that might have taken place six, nine, or eleven-and-a-half months before you publish your article.
When you address a particular event or development in merely a sentence or two before explaining the “So What?” or “Now What,” you’re robbing your audience of the context they need to understand how and why you came to your conclusion about the relevance of the event or development.
This is not, however, an invitation to devote 800 words to the details of a particular event or development. Take a paragraph, or maybe two, to walk through the details of the event or development. Remind your audience about what happened and what might have led to the event or development.
Give them the context they need to better appreciate why you’re discussing the event or development in your Year in Review article, and why you’re assigning it the importance you’re assigning it.
Fourth, your Year in Review thought leadership article only reviews the past year
Yes, of course, your Year in Review thought leadership article should recap and explain the relevance of a handful of key events and developments from the previous year.
But it shouldn’t focus solely on the past.
Your article should devote a portion of it—roughly the last quarter or third—to looking forward. You need not cram all your predictions for next year into this section, since they could form the basis for a separate thought leadership article.
But you should give your audience some guidance on what to think about as the new year kicks off, based on what happened the previous year (and the ramifications of those events and developments). This separates you from other attorneys and professionals who might also produce Year in Review thought leadership articles on the same industry you’re covering in your article.
There’s value in you breaking down which events and developments from the previous year were most important to your audience. But there’s additional value to be offered—and additional authority to be asserted—by giving your audience a sense of what to do with the information you’re providing them about the previous year’s events and developments as they head into the new year.
Fifth, your Year in Review thought leadership article reads like a stuffy piece of legal writing
Your Year in Review thought leadership article will be competing for your audience’s attention against the dozens of other Year in Review articles they will come across in their regular online/offline reading and social media scrolling.
They’re going to stumble upon Year in Review articles covering politics, sports, entertainment, technology, the stock market, their local communities, and just about every other conceivable area of society where something happened the previous year.
If your Year in Review thought leadership article is dull and boring, especially compared to non-law-firm-produced Year in Review articles, it won’t get read.
For that reason, your Year in Review article shouldn’t read like a typically stuffy piece of legal writing. It should have a more informal tone, but one that’s still professional. I recommend a tone that matches the tone you’d use when meeting colleagues or referral sources for a business lunch or participating in a panel discussion.
That said, there’s no need for you to douse your article with slang or dozens of pop culture references. You don’t want the informality to negatively affect how your audience perceives you; you want it to keep your audience interested in reading the article through to the last sentence.
Your article might be the most informative and important Year in Review article anyone in your audience will read. But if you can’t keep them interested as they read the article, they won’t come to realize that, and the article won’t do its job positioning you and your colleagues as knowledgeable, wise, and authoritative about the industry you serve and are covering in the article.
By the way, your Year in Review thought leadership article need not have a December 31 deadline
Just because each year ends on December 31 doesn’t mean you need to publish your Year in Review thought leadership article by that date.
People will stay in a New Year’s mindset the entire month of January. You can publish your article as late as the end of January, and it’ll still be fresh in the eyes of your audience.
Plus, there’s no reason to rush the writing and editing of the article to get it ready for publication in late December, only for far fewer people to read it at that time, during the holidays, than in January.
I recommend you and your colleagues start mapping out this article in late November or early December, start drafting it in December, and aim to finalize it by the first week or two of January. That way, you can publish it by the middle or end of January.
And, because you didn’t do the five things that I mentioned above, you will have produced a Year in Review thought leadership article that positions you and your colleagues as knowledgeable, wise, and authoritative about the industry that you serve—and will hopefully help you get your marketing and business development efforts off on the right foot in the new year.
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