Written thought leadership isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but your firm should be thinking about creating multimedia thought leadership
You already know that written thought leadership is a tried-and-true way to position attorneys as knowledgeable and wise about the areas of law they practice and the industries they serve.
The attorneys who regularly publish relevant, valuable, and compelling written thought leadership are the ones who have the most direct path to positioning themselves as the go-to attorneys for the work they do.
But with so much written content being published by attorneys and law firms each month, and the cost of producing multimedia content decreasing practically daily, attorneys and law firms that have robust thought leadership programs and want to stay at the cutting edge of legal thought leadership should consider implementing a multimedia thought leadership strategy in 2025 (and beyond).
Here are five reasons why.
Reason #1: Multimedia thought leadership helps you stand out from the pack
If most of your firm’s competitors are publishing written thought leadership — client alerts, articles, email blasts, etc.— and your firm comes along and offers podcasts and videos and other creative ways to get its attorneys’ knowledge, wisdom, and insights out into the marketplace, guess what? That’s going to make your firm stand out from the pack.
In addition, clients, referral sources, and other target audience members are going to think your firm is innovative because of how it’s producing and publishing multimedia thought leadership.
The neat thing is that they’re also going to think that if your firm is innovative regarding how it produces and publishes its attorneys’ thought leadership, the firm and its attorneys are probably innovative with how they tackle their clients’ legal issues and business issues.
Reason #2: Multimedia thought leadership is convenient to consume
If you want your thought leadership program to be effective, you need to do more than simply create thought leadership. You need to produce it and distribute it in ways that will get your target audience members to consume it.
After all, if your thought leadership content isn’t being consumed, it can’t do its job of positioning you and your colleagues as knowledgeable and wise, and as go-to attorneys for the kinds of work that you do.
When you produce thought leadership in multiple forms, you’re giving your clients, referral sources, and other target audience members options for how to consume it, which makes it more convenient for them to consume it, which makes it more likely that they will consume it.
Perhaps many members of your target audiences prefer to consume video-based thought leadership because they’re tired of reading blog posts, articles, and email newsletters. If you produce video-based thought leadership, you’re making it more convenient for them to consume it.
Same thing goes for those members of your audiences who want to consume thought leadership in podcast form while they work out, walk their dog, or run errands. If you produce thought leadership in podcast form, you’re increasing the chances they’ll consume your content because you’re making it more convenient for them to do so.
Reason #3: Multimedia thought leadership can help you build personal connections with your audience
You can surely demonstrate your personality through written thought leadership, like your blog posts and articles.
But multimedia thought leadership allows you to build deeper personal connections faster with your target audience members because they can get a better sense of your personality through videos and podcasts.
They can see your face in a video, along with your mannerisms. They can hear the inflection of your voice in a video or a podcast.
And, based on the nature of videos and podcasts, you might feel a bit freer when you’re producing one to make personal comments about your hobbies, your favorite foods, your favorite alcohol, your favorite vacation spot, and the like.
When you do, even though you’re making these comments in a professional context in connection with your thought leadership content, your audience will get to know you a bit better personally, which allows you to build a personal connection with them.
Reason #4: Multimedia thought leadership is more informal than written thought leadership
When you produce multimedia thought leadership, you need not obsess over punctuation, consistency of acronyms, consistency of references, footnotes, or similar components of a written thought leadership piece.
Because you need not worry about these things, you can focus more on what you’re saying when you produce multimedia thought leadership instead of how you’re saying it. That should make the process of creating multimedia thought leadership move faster.
You’re probably thinking that, even if this is the case, you’re going to need more resources when you’re producing multimedia thought leadership because you’re not typing text into Word or similar software.
You would be correct. To produce polished multimedia thought leadership, you’ll need a decent microphone and lighting. You’ll also need software to edit audio and video.
But let me tell you, these resources won’t cost you or your firm much. There’s plenty of software on the market that lets you edit video and audio in a way that’s similar to editing a Word document. You delete the words from an AI-generated transcript and the software edits the video/audio accordingly, removing the words you deleted. That software might cost you or your firm $20 to $40 per month.
The microphone and lighting you’ll need won’t be too expensive either. A solid microphone could be had for $100 or less. Great lighting could be had for under $200, if not under $100. But together, they’ll make you look like and sound like a million bucks.
Yes, you’ll probably want a colleague of yours to edit the videos and podcasts you create, but you need not hire a specialist to do so. There’s a lot of editing software on the market that’s easy to learn, so even a semi-technologically savvy colleague will be able to get the hang of editing your content quickly.
Reason #5: Multimedia thought leadership is easier to consume on social media
Multimedia thought leadership tends to play better on social media, which is where most attorneys’ target audience members are hanging out these days, regardless of the size of those attorneys’ firms or their practice areas.
Video or audio thought leadership can be edited so that your target audience members can get the gist of what you’re communicating within 10 to 15 seconds — a perfect amount of time for our shortened attention spans on social media.
Yes, you could communicate the summary or gist of what you’re saying in a written document in a few sentences at the beginning of it, but when people are (mindlessly?) scrolling social media, they’re looking for content that’s a light lift cognitively.
Social-media-friendly thought leadership in the form of multimedia thought leadership is just what the doctor ordered.
Written thought leadership is wonderful, but consider multimedia thought leadership
There’s nothing wrong with keeping your thought leadership program focused on written content in 2025 and for the foreseeable future. It’s a tried-and-true form that you and your colleagues can rely on to communicate your knowledge, wisdom, and insights to the world.
But multimedia thought leadership can be an effective and differentiated thought leadership offering for law firms.
As you think about your thought leadership program in 2025 and beyond, consider whether complementing your written thought leadership with multimedia thought leadership could be an example of one plus one equaling four.
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.