Re-caps of Sessions

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photo-1453847668862-487637052f8aLegal marketing is more than an art; it’s a science.

Or so says Tom Shapiro of Stratabeat, Inc, who presented one of the four TED Talks during an LMA16 breakout session at the recent Annual Conference in Austin, Texas. According to the session description:

The human brain processes information based on the work of more than 90 million neurons, and it’s these neurons that drive your prospective clients to do what they do. By attempting to market your law firm’s services without a deep understanding of human psychology, your marketing could actually be hurting your firm instead of helping it. According to Nielsen, 90% of buying decisions are made with the subconscious mind. Furthermore, neuroscience studies have proven that human decisions are emotionally driven. The factors that influence your prospective clients’ thinking — visual input, colors, emotion, social validation, repetition, neural filtering, etc. — are diverse, yet with the right approach are easy to execute effectively in your marketing. If you want stellar marketing results, your marketing should focus on delivering the most powerful impact to the subconscious mind.

In this session, learn the fundamentals of powerful marketing that move people to action. Understand the underlying reasons why certain marketing works and other marketing falls flat. Uncover actual neuromarketing techniques to appeal to the subconscious mind, attract more attention, drive more website visitors, propel higher volumes of inbound phone calls, create more memorable marketing and achieve increased conversions.”

Continue Reading Legal Marketing with Science!

unsplash_523b1f5aafc42_1The best session that I attended at the Legal Marketing Association‘s Annual Conference by far was “ROI: Measuring So You Can Better Manage,” with Equinox Strategy Partners‘ Jonathan Fitzgarrald (Full disclosure: Jonathan is a friend of mine, but whether I’d known him or not, this session was chock full of value).

Per the conference guide:

As stewards of marketing and business development resources, legal marketers can build trust and rapport within their firms and obtain buy-in for key initiatives by managing expectations and measuring results.

Join Jonathan Fitzgarrald of Equinox Strategy Partners as he provides real-life examples and best practices surrounding:

  • Key metrics for justifying your existence at your firm
  • Formats and frequency for reporting results
  • Determining which attorneys should see what metrics
  • How to better leverage peer (e.g., finance) relationships
  • Available technologies for tracking and reporting metrics”

Jonathan used the session to give us ten actionable steps that we can use within our own firms and organizations to better manage the relationships with our lawyers. 
Continue Reading 10 Ways to be a Legal Marketing Rock Star

photo-1429277158984-614d155e0017“What if we showed up and said ‘We’re human too’?” asked Deloitte CMO, Diana O’Brien during last week’s Legal Marketing Association‘s keynote presentation.

It may seem like a strange message from a CMO when talking about marketing your brand, but like many of us, O’Brien has been emphasizing that the client experience is essential for marketing success – and the way to connect with your clients is by “creating moments that matter” and then acting on them.

She focused on a few key themes that supported this idea throughout her presentation: 
Continue Reading Marketing: Creating Moments that Matter

cropped-005-lma-ne-2015-conference-email-banner_emailRather than bringing you our regularly scheduled “Two for Tuesdays” today, I’m continuing the roundup from the LMA New England Conference, with “Creating a WOW Communications Program,” another excellent session I attended.

Whether you’re tasked directly with communications or not, the truth is that we’re all communicators in our firms – we all have messages to deliver, whether it’s as lawyers to clients or as marketers to our lawyers. So there are strong benefits to gain from this session for all of us. 
Continue Reading Creating a WOW Communications Program

cropped-005-lma-ne-2015-conference-email-banner_emailAs I’ve mentioned, the LMA NE conference was full of really meaty, thought-provoking content. One of the excellent sessions I attended was “Lead Nurturing Ecosystems – Moving Legal Marketing from an Art to a Science.”

The panelists for the session were:

Continue Reading Lead Nurturing Ecosystems – Moving Legal Marketing from an Art to a Science

cropped-005-lma-ne-2015-conference-email-banner_emailDuring the LMA NE conference, one of the sessions I was most looking forward to was the keynote with Adam Grossman, the Senior Vice President/Marketing & Brand Development, Boston Red Sox & Fenway Sports Management. It may seem like a stretch that legal marketing and baseball marketing have anything in common, but if you’re a regular Zen reader, you’ll know that I love looking outside of our industry for inspiration. 

Grossman actually did an excellent job of tying in sports marketing to what we do – typically these speakers will leave it up to us to make the connections (something that we should be easily able to do, by the way), but he spelled it out for us pretty nicely, in an engaging and entertaining presentation that may have almost converted this non-baseball fan.

Grossman’s mentor is Larry Lucchino, himself a “recovering lawyer,” so he has special insight into what it’s like to work in this profession, and that helped frame his comments. He shared with us a few essential tips for marketing that we could all agree were great takeaways.
Continue Reading How Baseball is Like Legal Marketing – A Keynote

cropped-005-lma-ne-2015-conference-email-banner_emailDuring last week’s LMA NE conference, we were treated to quite a lot of high level, meaty content. Over the next few weeks, I’ll share recaps of the various sessions here, and I invite you to participate in the discussion!

First up, we have the crisis communications panel that kicked off the conference on the first evening: Crisis Communications: Out of Great Adversity Comes Great Opportunity! From the program description:

In times of despair, crisis communications must be faster than a speeding bullet, stronger than a locomotive, and able to leap all law firm obstructions. Our team of ‘superhero’ panelists are armed with specific pointers on how to best handle crisis communications matters within and outside of a firm. They’ll offer how-to methods and real-life anecdotes for creating a communications plan, as well as ways to use a crisis as an opportunity to strengthen your firm. Details will be provided on how to work through the knee-jerk ‘no comment’ response law firms and lawyers are known for. Panelists will share best practices for damage control and secrets to learning from past mistakes. Arm yourself and be ready to swing into action!”

Continue Reading What’s Your WOW Factor: Crisis Communications

eDLHCtzRR0yfFtU0BQar_sylwiabartyzel_themapToday, I had the pleasure of attending (via Skype along with the LMA NJ City Group) the Metro New York’s presentation of “Legal Marketing Goes Global: Maximizing International Success for your Firm.” The session was a panel discussion (with questions from the audience throughout) that featured moderator Bob Robertson, the Director of Strategic Business Development at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, LLP, and panelists, Howard Kravitz, the US Marketing Leader for PwC and Joanne Southern, the Chief Marketing Officer for Proskauer.

Without going through the entire panel discussion (which was excellent), I do want to offer some key takeaways that I thought were particularly poignant and valuable: 
Continue Reading Legal Marketing Goes Global – A Panel Recap

"Be more human." 

That was the closing advice from the LMA’s keynote speaker, Dan Pink, at this year’s conference.

While it was easy to compare Pink to the previous two years’ keynotes (Kat Cole and James Kane) and find him a bit lacking, especially when it came to audience engagement on Twitter, he still offered some great tidbits of information for us to takeaway (and many of the live tweeters following along offered a lot of strong praise for the speech).

Anecdotally, when speaking with several regular LMA attendees, they told me that they felt as though the keynote should be more of a "rah rah" type of presentation to pump up legal marketers, but instead, this was more for and about our lawyers.  I agree with that assessment, so the lawyers among my readers may find more value in the content from Dan Pink. 

For a much more concise recap of the session than I’m about to offer, check out Heather Morse’s post right from Pink’s presentation. Continue Reading Leadership and the New Principles of Influence – An LMA Recap

Attendees at the Legal Marketing Association conference will normally shy away from any session that is entirely presented by service providers – but if that session is done by One North, they’re making a big mistake. 

Not only are they always entertaining, but they assume the audience comes in with a high level understanding of the content to begin with (not always the case with all presenters, admittedly) and they deliver some solid food for thought. 

At #LMA15, their session was on "Creating Natively Digital Brand Experiences," which sounds like a lot of terrifying marketing speak. We are going to talk about branding and logos, but the marketing nerd in me loves all of this, so please bear with me. For the lawyers in my audience, you may want to read along anyway – it will give you some insight into the broader challenges that your firm and your firm’s marketing professionals face when it comes to branding (which is an important issue!). 

LMA members, if you missed this, Kalev Peekna and Nate Denton from One North, the conference presenters, will be sharing highlights from their presentation in the next Social Media SIG webinar on May 12th – members can register here. Continue Reading Creating Natively Digital Brand Experiences – A Recap