Happy Tuesday all! I’m gearing up to head out to Chicago again for the Legal Marketing Association’s Practice Innovation Conference – also known as P3: Project Management, Pricing, Process Improvement. I’ll be blogging and live tweeting from the sessions on Thursday and Friday, so keep an eye out for some great content!
But first, we’re
We have a late, breaking Two for Tuesdays for you tonight, and even better, it’s a special guest post from my dear friend Nancy Myrland! I’ve arrived in Chicago for the final prep and overseeing of our Annual Meeting (which accounts for the delay in getting this published) and Nancy kindly agreed to offer you some words of wisdom for this Tuesday. Without further ado…
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TWO WAYS TO REPURPOSE YOUR CONTENT
First, thanks to my good friend, Lindsay, for allowing me to grace the virtual pages of her blog by bringing you this week’s installment of Two for Tuesdays.
Lindsay and I talk a lot about Content Marketing these days. It’s the marketing phrase du jour, or at least one of them. Whether you choose to adopt the industry vernacular, or not, it is important to have this overarching umbrella term, and its related components, in mind when discussing legal marketing.
In a moment, we are going to talk about two simple ways you can repurpose content you may have already created.
Let’s take a half of a step back, and define Content Marketing. To do so, we need to know what Content is. In a recent post of mine on LinkedIn called What Is The Difference Between Content and Content Marketing, I offered this simple definition:
Content is the words and messages you deliver, regardless of the delivery mechanism. Content Marketing is the use, or marketing, of those words in an effort to reach other people.”
Greentarget, ALM Legal Intelligence, and Zeughauser Group have released the results of their 2014 survey, newly titled "2014 State of Digital & Content Marketing Survey." The change in title is a great reflection of the change in conversation in the last year, a shift in focus to the discussion around content marketing, and how social tools are used to that end.
As we in legal know, lawyers have been doing content marketing for as long as we can remember, but we finally have a name for it!
This year’s survey also has another new feature – a survey of law firm CMOs and marketers. You may remember that we discussed some of the results already, with a focus on LinkedIn, following the LMA conference, but today, let’s take a look at the most important conversation piece to come out of the survey (which you can review in full here). Next week, we’ll take a look at some of the results in more detail. Continue Reading Corporate Journalism is the Future According to Greentarget
In our second installment of Wondering Wednesdays, I answer the question "What is content marketing, and how can I use it successfully?"
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Content marketing is defined by the Content Marketing Institute as creating and curating valuable content to attract and retain clients. I would take it a step further and add that it’s also
Towards the end of December, we hosted a webinar with Adrian Lurssen, one which I’d sat in on previously. But this time, Adrian said something that really stuck with me – he said that you can’t just build a blog. You also need to build an audience.
That got me thinking about how many people start a blog, start writing content (even great content), and then sit back and wait for the magic to happen – a la Field of Dreams, if you build it, will they come?
The short answer is no – and I’m not the only one thinking about this. For the why, you need to take a look over at Jayne Navarre’s latest post "2014 Reboot: In case you’ve forgotten, law Blogs are (still) ‘social’ media" and Kevin O’Keefe’s follow-up "Do not confuse writing an article with blogging."
I’ve had an idea for a post noodling around in my brain for a few weeks, but I’ve been having trouble getting it to crystallize. Until yesterday, when I read Sayre Happich’s "Seven Content Marketing Tips for Lawyers."
Sayre says:
All lawyers can benefit from content marketing. By creating targeted content — blog posts, articles, tweets — and pushing it out through the right channels, you can position yourself as a thought leader in a specific area of law. And, whether you are a solo practitioner or part of a megafirm, that can lead to more clients."
She is absolutely right. I’ve seen time and time again that the firms that are successful today are the ones who are sharing substantive content on a regular basis (there are other contributing reasons of course, but the same mindset that leads them to create substantive content and share it, is the mindset that helps them find success).
What I’m going to say next might be a bit controversial, but I’ll say it anyway – clients do not care about press releases announcing that an attorney was quoted in an article. They’re not going to do the work of first clicking through to the firm’s press release to see that someone was quoted, and then clicking again to get to the actual article – they’re too busy. That’s not substantive content. Even if something leads to substantive content, if you make it hard for your audience to find it, they will not take the time to do so. Continue Reading Content Marketing is King
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of sitting in on another of the LMA’s Social Media Shared Interest Group’s webinars, this time with Adrian Lurssen of JD Supra. Adrian talked about some best practices for getting clients to read a law firm’s online content, using a case study to walk us through.
As I’ve noted before, I won’t give away everything from the webinar, since it’s an LMA membership benefit, but there was some great advice that Adrian shared with us.
His case study focused on the discussions surrounding the America Invents Act, for which JD Supra saw 82 firms producing content. Of these firms, only one stood out, Pepper Hamilton. Adrian delved into the "why" of the popularity of their post, as well as defining the goals we should be pursuing as we produce content. Continue Reading Is Anybody Going to Click on That? Getting Clients to Read Law Firm Content, A Webinar Recap
I’m a big believer that every marketing tactic is not for everyone – we all have our strengths. Some people will be excellent public speakers, who enjoy sharing their expertise with large audiences. Others will be happy to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, as it were) and write blog posts and articles. Still others will shine when you put them in a room full of strangers to network.
As many people as there are, there will be marketing tactics and ways of implementing them.
But I will say that if your firm is not creating and delivering content that can be shared in some way, you are missing out.
When I was growing up, content was created for you – if you wanted the news, you’d buy a newspaper or magazine and read a series of articles that were written by others and put together by others. The television news was the same. You had very little say over what was produced, other than using your purchasing or viewing power to reflect your likes and dislikes. Continue Reading It’s All About the Content