Every 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.
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Two Ways to Make Social Media Work for You
Although 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.
Referrals and First Impressions: How Technology Has Changed Them
Seeing 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.
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Two Ways to Make Your Content Relevant to Your Audience
The saying goes “If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
If you’re writing or producing content, it should be “If you write an article [blog post, tweet, produce a video, etc.] and no one reads it, does it matter?”
The short answer is no.
For me, content is very much tied up with content audiences – if you’re taking the time to write or create something to add value and promote your message, then it should matter to and reach your audiences, right?
How can you make that happen?
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Two Tips to Add Personality to Your Content
One of the greatest criticisms you hear for legal content is that it’s lacking in personality. Lawyers have the talent and the intelligence to communicate their valuable legal expertise, but often, their passion for the subject doesn’t translate well for someone who’d prefer that they “give it to them straight” instead of filling an article, post, or video with legalese.
But what does that mean – “add personality” to your content? And how do you do it?
The Content Marketing Institute’s Sarah Rickerd authored a great post this week with 10 Tips to Pack More Personality into Your Content, and two of them really stuck out for me. Before we touch on them, I know your first question is going to be “why bother?” The reason is simple, and Sarah addresses it early on – it’s about engagement.
We’ve talked before about how short our attention spans are today – ideally, the right audience would see your post, realize how important your message is for them, and hang on every word. But the reality is that we’re all busy people, and unless we’re engaged in what we’re reading, we’re going to move on to the next thing in seconds. Your audience may save your content for another day, when they have “more time,” or with the greatest of intentions of reading or viewing it, or they may never pay attention to it at all.
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Two Ways Content Marketing is Like Running
If you’ve been spending any time with me lately, you know that I’ve been running. A lot.
I’m training for my first half marathon, which is in two and a half weeks, and yes, I’m nervous about it. I’ve never run that far (“that far” being 13.1 miles if you’re not familiar with the half marathon distance). I’ve done several 5ks, and one rather dubious 10k in the rain, where I ended up walking a lot due to a lack of training, but this time, I’m serious.
I’ve been serious about my training, my rest time, my nutrition, the whole kit and kaboodle.
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Two Ways Content Marketing Can Advance Your Professional Brand
Last week, I was speaking with one of my lawyers about content marketing and social media, and he wanted to know whether “all this blogging and social media stuff” really brings in work for lawyers. It’s a question I get a lot from my lawyers, and one that ties in nicely with an article I was just reading this afternoon, so I thought I’d share my answer with you here as well.
While there are those one-off stories that you hear, when the timing is just right that a lawyer blogs about a topic and an in-house counsel is looking for an expert in that area at the same time, and they find each other and a matter is secured, that’s certainly not the norm. I’ve never suggested to my lawyers that they engage in social media because it’s going to directly lead to more work coming in. What I do tell them is that it enhances their existing word-of-mouth reputation. When I was speaking with my lawyer last week, I said to him what’s much more likely to happen is that a potential client will be looking for a referral, and someone that they know, like, and trust will give them a name.
As we all do these days, the potential client will then Google that lawyer. When they do so, if what comes up is a series of well-written, thoughtful blog posts on the subject matter that the potential client is interested in, a robust LinkedIn profile that showcases the lawyer’s expertise in the area, and a Twitter feed that shows that they engage with thought leaders in the industry and share relevant content (both their own and others) that puts them on the cutting edge, then the potential client will feel more confident and comfortable in giving the work to that lawyer. It’s human nature – we want to have our choices confirmed so that there’s as little risk as possible in making them.
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Two Ways to Translate Content Marketing into Relationship Marketing
Remember the good old days when we just did a bunch of things and didn’t have specialized terms for them? Yep, these aren’t them.
“Social media marketing” came about when social media platforms were introduced and we learned how to use online technology to build relationships that we’d previously been building offline (that’s tremendously simplified, but you get the idea). Then “content marketing” came along to describe what many law firms had been doing for years – writing about the law and its impact on their clients, and then sharing it with them. As a term, content marketing is broader than that, but in terms of the legal industry, that’s pretty much the short version.
As we worked through the introduction of the terms, we separated people into two camps: the “broadcasters” and the “engagers.” The “broadcasters” treated social media and content marketing as a means to spread their message around, but without the end goal of developing community with anyone. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just a different valuation – some of the goals that firms/lawyers who embrace this philosophy might be pursuing are reputation enhancement, being considered a thought leader on a particular subject, etc. Many firms/lawyers have been successful, and even built a large following this way, and spend little or no time engaging with their audience.
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Two Ways to Use LinkedIn to Attract Your Ideal Client
Of all the social media platforms out there, I’d venture to say that LinkedIn is the one that lawyers are most comfortable using. It has a reputation for being the most professional, and as a result, it’s had the widest adoption within the industry. In recent years, LinkedIn has really expanded their offerings, and provided a robust, deep platform that allows us to engage in new ways, all which make it an even more valuable platform than it was at the beginning.
Like any social platform (or any tool, really), LinkedIn is what you make of it – you can treat it as a place to broadcast from, and as long as you have something valuable to say, you may find that many people are listening to you. But if you want to use it as a business development tool, then you need to get serious about the steps that you take to leverage its features. I read a great article today over on Inc which talked about three ways to use LinkedIn to attract your ideal customer. Since “sales” is a dirty word for lawyers, we’re instead going to talk about using LinkedIn for business/relationship development (which, by the way, is really the same thing, but said in a more palatable way).
Since it’s our Two for Tuesday day, we’ll just presume that you already have a robust LinkedIn profile. I promise that at some point this year, I will update my LinkedIn for Lawyers book, which is a step-by-step process for setting up a profile, but for the moment, let’s set aside that tip and focus on the other two that Inc author, Bill Carmody, suggests.
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Stay Open & Enjoy the Moments: How High School Lessons Apply to Lawyers
After eighteen years, tomorrow marks the first time I’m going back to high school.
Sure, I was in the gym for my sisters’ graduations, but other than that I haven’t actually been back in the building since the day I graduated and headed out into the world, a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old, excited for the next phase in my life. A friend of mine who is now a guidance counselor at the school asked me to sit on a panel of graduates to talk about my life since graduation, and how attending IHA (Immaculate Heart Academy) prepared me for college and the workforce. We’re speaking to a group of sophomores who are in a special program because of their top scores on the high school entrance exams, and although we’ve each been given five minutes to cram our entire post-graduate lives into a snapshot, all I keep thinking about is “What do I really want to communicate to these girls?”
This is an institution, in an area of the country, where the pressure is on – it’s quite acceptable for the girls to strive for excellence at great sacrifice to their happiness and mental health. Academic rigor is prized – by the school, by the girls, by their families; and add to that the addition of being well-prepped for college by being involved in sports, extracurriculars, and going above and beyond in every way imaginable. I’m not trying to put down the school – IHA was a rigorous foundation for me – the focus on writing and critical thinking meant that by the time I got to college, I had the basic skills so ingrained in me that I was able to focus on what I was really there to do – learn. I was fortunate to have some amazing teachers at IHA from Mr. McLoughlin to Ms. Fritsche to Ms. McDonough to Mrs. Sandt and more, who all cared about challenging me every day to be my best self. They gave me the building blocks upon which the foundation of my education was built, which allowed me the confidence to pursue my interests (rather than strictly the requirements) in college. And as much as I didn’t think of myself as a writer when I started at IHA, the emphasis on writing as a skill has been invaluable to me – first in college, where we also had a strong commitment to writing, and subsequently as a professional, where I write on a daily basis.
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