By: Laura Gutierrez, Director of Referral Partnerships, JD Supra
Content data is everywhere, scattered across website analytics, email platforms, social media dashboards, and CRM systems. Every article published, every email opened, every download tracked adds to the pile. No longer are we starved for intelligence; we’re overwhelmed by its abundance.
What do we do with it all?
Try to understand it, of course—to put it together and follow the journey where it leads. Depending on your firm’s tech stack and department makeup, this can be relatively easy or difficult. Most tools provide charts and graphs that better visualize what the numbers might be telling you; some tools aggregate and provide an analysis for you (like JD Supra’s integration with Intapp or a tool like HubSpot); there are even tools that only focus on client intelligence. Still, it’s important to understand what’s at play and how to use its intelligence.
There are three phases of gathering and leveraging content analytics for BD:
This article covers the first phase: contextualizing data. Future articles will tackle mapping and packaging.
The foundation for using analytics for BD intelligence is understanding the context surrounding it.
Think of email marketing data: the numbers don’t matter if you're sending to the wrong audience. There’s more to analytics than highs and lows.
Let’s take a look at some contextual factors when it comes to thinking about data analytics for BD.
Consider what platform it’s coming from: Google Analytics, social media, email marketing, paid advertising, or syndicated partners. Likely, your target audience isn’t spread across all of those; you’ll want to look more closely at the data associated with the platform that has the highest concentration of your intended audience. For many of us in professional services, that’s LinkedIn or our website (closer to the sales part of the funnel).
Expand your data extraction beyond your firm’s digital properties to your attorneys who are sharing it. For example, ask your attorneys to share their LinkedIn post statistics. These numbers may shape some of your understanding.
Don’t forget to gather anecdotal evidence! Ask your attorneys at regular intervals if they’ve seen an increase in engagement or had targets reach out. These actions are really what you’re trying to enact.
Not every piece of content warrants a deep analysis, and what’s worthy depends on what matters to your internal clients and your resource capacity. The good news is that there’s no right answer, and there are lots of ways to segment and prioritize.
First, you’ll get better results if you’re posting consistently in your target segments. While you can gather intelligence from one-off articles or advertisements, without averages across time, you don’t have anything else to check against. Isolated data points can lead you down rabbit holes—a single viral post might attract the wrong audience, or an outlier metric might suggest a trend that doesn't actually exist.
Consider your firm’s strategic priorities: often, these align with practice group initiatives. Sometimes, they might be a niche subject, but the important piece is that for strategic initiatives, you want a consistent effort. Think of content for BD as building a relationship without direct contact.
Most content on the internet lives beyond the initial post date. The question is: when do you pull data for intelligence? Timing considerations vary by platform and content type, which is another layer to the segmentation decisions above.
Social media posts have a shorter shelf life. Typically, you pull statistics within days because the algorithm is the one serving up content to users. Social platforms may be searchable, but they’re not as robust or weighted as search engines or indexed sites. I know LinkedIn tends to have a 3-week cycle for posts, so that would be a good time to pull data.
Campaigns are typically measured by the length of the campaign, as they disappear once the ad period is over. If campaigns are tied to a strategic initiative, they’re often aggregated over time.
Content syndicators like JD Supra and firm websites don’t have expiration dates and are searchable, so consider these data points at set intervals. Look at all content on a quarterly and yearly basis. For content related to campaigns or strategic initiatives, I suggest adding one week and one-month intervals in addition to the quarterly and yearly reviews.
Different data points carry different weight for business development purposes, and understanding their relative value is key to efficient analysis.
Here’s a list of common data points found in content platforms, starting with the least useful:
Even contact information—the most valuable single data point—rarely tells you the whole story on its own. You wouldn’t want to recommend your lawyer contact someone who only interacted with one piece of content. Your lawyer would have much better luck at forming a relationship with the contact armed with more information. Data-informed outreach beats blind outreach every time.
Understanding context is the foundation—knowing where your data comes from, how to segment it, when to pull it, and which data points actually matter. But individual datapoints, even contact information, rarely tell the complete story on their own.
The real power comes from connecting these data points across platforms and over time identify patternsof genuine interest.
In the next article, we'll explore how to map data to transform isolated metrics into actionable business intelligence.