photo-1422480415834-d7d30118ea06Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of serving as a judge for the Legal Marketing Association’s Your Honor Awards. These awards are the “longest-running annual international award program recognizing excellence in legal marketing,” and it’s the second time I’ve been able to serve as a judge. I enjoy it not only because of the camaraderie among my fellow judges, but because I get to see some of the smartest work in the industry, and get a sense of how firms and other professional services organizations in the legal industry are meeting the challenges that we face every day.

When we judge the selection of entries, we’re each given a few categories that we’re responsible for scoring, based on a list of criteria, and then we get together for a weekend in early January to review the entries with our fellow category judges, and then as a group. We then award first, second, third, and honorable mention as appropriate – and we have the option to award no prizes at all if we don’t think the entries are worthy, so when an entrant wins a prize, they really deserve it.  Continue Reading Two Takeaways for Surveys as Content Marketing

photo-1447069387593-a5de0862481eEvery time I want to learn something about content marketing, I look to Neil Patel, co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and KISSmetrics, and author for the Content Marketing Institute. In one of his latest posts, Patel addresses “How to Fix the 4 Biggest Problems with Content Writers.” Since it’s a Two for Tuesdays post, it actually works out well that I only want to focus on two of his four identified problems, and translate them over for the legal industry.  Continue Reading Fixing the Two Biggest Problems with Legal Writers

FirmoftheMonth1

May/June 2016

The ILN is proud to announce our latest firm of the month, Davis, Malm & D’Agostine, P.C. – Boston, Massachusetts!

Davis Malm is a premier full-service New England firm providing sophisticated, cost-effective legal representation to local, regional, national, and international public and private businesses, institutions, and individuals in a wide spectrum of business sectors and legal matters. Since its founding in 1979, lawyers at Davis Malm have practiced at the top level of the profession delivering successful results to clients through direct partner involvement, responsive client service, and practical and creative problem solving. Continue Reading ILN Firm of the Month – Davis, Malm & D’Agostine, Boston, Massachusetts!

bag-and-handsI love bringing guest voices to Zen to share some wisdom with you, and today, I am fortunate to introduce a legal marketer and friend of mine, Jennifer Simpson Carr. Jenn has led business development and communications efforts at national law firms for nearly ten years.  She has a passion for strategic communications and recently earned a Mini-MBA in Digital Marketing from Rutgers Business School.

I got to know Jenn when she was working with ILN member firm, Davis & Gilbert, in New York, and we’ve stayed in touch as her career and family have taken her all over the country. This is her first foray into blogging, offering an excellent recap of the roundtable session she led during last week’s Law Firm Marketing & Business Development Forum, with some important takeaways on creating a digital strategy across your firm. Let’s give her a warm welcome!  Continue Reading Creating a Cohesive Digital Strategy Across Your Firm

photo-1459184070881-58235578f004These days, everyone is talking about video – whether you’re livestreaming or pre-recording, it’s something the legal industry can no longer ignore. And those law firms doing it well are ahead of the curve, and getting attention! So I didn’t want to miss the LMA’s session on “Video Isn’t Just for Hollywood,” with Lane Powell’s Jennifer Castleberry, ReelLawyers’ Bill White, and Sutherland’s Stephen DiGennaro.

The session description said:

Video isn’t just for Hollywood anymore. Let’s take a look at innovative and successful ways to incorporate video into law firm websites. Serving up what your user wants — and not what you want — is critical. Our panelists will talk strategy including what has worked and what hasn’t. You will walk away wanting to incorporate video into your website or wanting to change how you’re approaching this content medium which will become main stream for law firms in the next three years.”

For this content-loving legal marketer, that description focuses on the same theme that we’re always talking about here at Zen: the audience. So whether your content is the written word or the spoken one, you’ve still got to know who your audience is, and what they want.  Continue Reading Video Isn’t Just for Hollywood…It’s for Lawyers Too!

photo-1416453072034-c8dbfa2856b5Although social media has been around for a while (and isn’t going anywhere), there’s still this idea in the legal industry and even among many legal marketers that it’s a game, or a waste of time.

But social media, when used strategically and correctly, can actually be about relationship-building and business development.

I could go into a long diatribe about why this is true, what the statistics say to support it, or even start a series about the various tips and tricks you could be using in your own practices for better use of social media – but I won’t.

I will say that, like any other marketing tactic, it’s not for everyone. It’s a tool to be considered and used as part of your overall arsenal, if and when it meets with the goals that you’ve set out and the strategy that you’ve developed. Just as importantly though, don’t discount it as being “for kids” simply because it’s something that you’ve seen your own children using, or you think it’s only big with celebrities, or you’ve heard that it’s somewhere that people can waste hours.

No one embraced the telephone right away either, and now you keep one in your pocket.

(And if people are determined to waste time somewhere, they’ll find a way to do it, whether it’s on Facebook, or on personal calls, or playing games on a non-internet connected device).

All of that being said, this week, I’d like to talk about two concrete ways that social media can work for you – specifically and successfully.

Tip One: Blogging as a Relationship Builder

Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog has long espoused blogging as more than just a platform for putting your thoughts down on paper, so to speak. If used strategically, it’s actually a way to meet the people that you want to meet. Let’s look at an example – in January, I blogged about Two Tools to Turn Trends into Topics, which was based off of a blog post written by Ann Smarty over at the Content Marketing Institute. I often look to CMI for inspiration when I’m blogging, and it’s the second time I’ve referenced Ann in a post that I’ve written for Zen – she writes good stuff.

Continue Reading Two Ways to Make Social Media Work for You

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

5cde60f6Seeing Jabez LeBret at last week’s Legal Marketing Association Annual Conference reminded me that I needed to catch up on my Legal Coffee Break podcasts – if you’re not yet familiar with it, the Legal Coffee Break podcast is a concise, less than ten-minute, update on legal marketing, technology, and other issues in the legal industry, hosted by GNGF founders Mark Homer and Jabez, with Jabez being the primary voice to this point.

Episode 26 discusses two things that are important to lawyers, and how they have changed with the advent of technology: referrals, and first impressions. Since Jabez talks about issues that I regularly address with my own lawyers, this one particularly stuck with me.  Continue Reading Referrals and First Impressions: How Technology Has Changed Them

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