There are times when I really wonder if the world has gone mad. We were approached last week and offered £10,000 a year to manage the social media output/e-newsletters etc of a law firm. The firm want to create their own content and get someone else to manage it for them.
This is, as I pointed out to them, utterly bonkers.
Firstly, to produce the content they’ll want to produce will cost about £30k a year.
Then you have to add the £10k they’ll be throwing at us and the cost of the (what I am sure will be endless) to-ing and fro-ing about output schedules, content selection and so on. I’d guess this’ll cost at least £2,000 worth of marketer etc time, IF the partners/fee-earners can resist getting involved.
I didn’t even mention the time they’ll spend chasing people for copy, editing it and the problems they’ll face making sure their content shows off all the services the firm offers, not just those departments with the enthusiasm for copy creation. I also didn't mention how much they'll spend if they get the copy properly edited (and it should be) and then the internal politics about how to handle mistakes/failure to follow style guidelines and so on.
I didn't mention the issue of how they make sure this 'internal content' creates goodwill for the firm, not the writer as an individual.
What makes more sense?
Using our LegalRSS platform produces this result…
We supply the content – saving £30,000 in house time (a lot more content than they can produce, more timely and produced by experienced and qualified B2C writers, which they aren’t).
They manage the content , e-newsletter sending etc – using our system this will take their marketer about 30 minutes a week. Let’s say a week a year at £600 a week = £600. They will save a bundle of marketer time also.
Money for Nothing and the integrations/automation comes free. LegalRSS integrates top marketing tools such as Buffer, Snip.ly, Campaign Monitor, allows content sharing/segmentation/automated newsletter subscription management etc …will cost them less than £2500 a year.
So, they would save £40,000 – (£2500+£600) = £36,900 a year (approx £4k per partner) and have better marketing to boot.
… and it solves all the other issues mentioned above.
Were they interested?
No.
Why?
Because they think (and this is the really crazy bit) that they can add sufficient value and show their own superior insight using the content that they write to justify the difference in cost and that it also makes sense to justify the loss of control, speed and marketing capability to do that.
If you do the sums I'd guess it is pretty obvious that less material, not professionally written, not segmented and with far less extensive distribution produced at about 20 times the cost is likely do offer much lower ROI than our proposal.
Can the marginal value of their own expertise get anywhere close to that? Very unlikely indeed …I'd put it somewhere close to my house being hit by an asteroid tomorrow.
(First written March 2016)
The real irony for me is that these people project themselves as business people and offer commercial advice whilst operating their own business in such a commercially sub-optimal way.
No, we didn't pursue the job…sure we could do it, but I really just can't put our company in the position of taking on a project as deeply flawed as their proposal… and despite the fact that we put their interest ahead of our own, I suspect that our response will have gone down badly with some of them.
Proof of the adage that you can take a horse to water, etc.