5 Tactics for Building a Writing Culture in Your Firm
Accounting firm marketing professionals often commiserate about the difficulty in getting their partners and managers to feed the always-hungry content beast.
Newsletters, blogs and social media need to be kept current with topical, timely articles - “content” that is meaningful to the firm’s clients and prospects.
It stands to reason that your firm’s professionals are the subject matter experts most qualified to write content that represents the firm well. But with busy accountants always facing down the next deadline and under pressure to rack up billable hours, where is the time for them to write?
Here are five tactics to help build a writing culture in your firm:
1. Spread the joy. Many people are uncomfortable with writing or struggle with even the simplest topics. That may lead to relying on the same few professionals - who are competent writers - to produce most of the content for your firm. But this can result in burnout or resentment. Writing responsibilities should be spread liberally among staff levels and throughout departments. Talk to each practice leader about how to establish a writing culture within his/her team. If competition works as a motivator in your firm, build some gamification into it!
2. Hold short writing training sessions focused on specific topic areas. Gear these sessions to specific audiences - staff accountants or managers, for example, zeroing in on one or two helpful writing tactics. For instance, give them a couple of paragraphs of content on a tax topic, and challenge them to write a 160-character meta description or a 280-character tweet. This will help focus their thinking and make them concentrate on efficient word usage.
3. Work with small groups to build personas that will help focus your firm’s content. Reluctant writers may be more comfortable if they can envision a specific client for whom they are writing.
4. Get support from the top. If your firm’s managing partner sets an example by writing content, it will be noticed. And if content production is built into evaluations as a key performance element, it will make a strong statement.
5. Understand that some people just aren’t writers. Work with them on alternative activities they can engage in to support the marketing communications effort. Perhaps if they can’t write, they can help research topics and build bullet points or data sets that the writers can use to produce their content.
You may have found other tactics that work to motivate the professionals in your firm to help produce content. We’d love to hear about them! Let us know about them in the comments section.