Twitter

Using Twitter is a great way to enhance your personal brand as well as your firm brand. It can be hard to find time to write long-form, but tweets are short and you have control over them yourself, making it easy to create and share content on the platform. Importantly, it is also easy to engage with leaders in your practice area or industry, to raise your profile.

Continue Reading How to Use Twitter to Build Your Brand

If you know me or have seen me speak, you can tell that I am very passionate about what I do – and it makes it all worthwhile when you actually hear from people about how you actually helped and inspired them to go the extra mile in their marketing efforts or to step out of their comfort zone. I recently received this LinkedIn message and it really touched me:

“I saw you at the NYC bar panel for small businesses the other day. As a result of implementing a few of your ideas so far – including making my first LinkedIn post and updating my profile – I became more visible. I was then contacted by several former colleagues who were excited to learn that I had recently started my own firm. One of them even offered to send me work! I know I have a lot more to do, but just taking the first few steps helps a lot. Thank you.”

I sincerely thank the attendee who took the time to send me this note – it means so much to me.

Content marketing takes time and effort, but staying top of mind with your target audiences is a key goal to marketing and business development – and providing value-added content is one way in which you can do this while branding yourself as a subject-matter expert in your area of the law.

Here are 12 tips to make your content marketing efforts successful and worthwhile from my latest JD Supra article. Keep in mind that they may take time to show real ROlI, but I have seen thought leadership content lead to new business over and over, so be patient!

Here’s a link to the full JD Supra article.

As Social Media Today reported, Facebook has launched a new groups option called ‘work groups,’ which, Facebook says, will help people “connect with their coworkers more easily.” The option seeks to reduce the need to connect with every person you work with, and let them into your more personal interactions. By creating a specific group only for work colleagues, you can keep the two elements separate, with only your work-related information showing up in your work group profile.

The option also enables work group members to send messages to each other, without needing to be Facebook friends. This is great news for those who want to keep their personal and professional lives separate – which is something most business people should do. Bravo Facebook!

Read more about the new feature.

I always love reading annual the Greentarget State of Digital & Content Marketing study. It is filled with great insights and suggestions on how law firms and professional service firms can better engage with their target audiences by using social media and content. Here are some of my favorite takeaways from the study:

  • According to the survey, 96% of in-house counsel say that there is content overload in the market (most of them won’t even open your emails so even reaching them is incredibly difficult), while 81% of law firm marketers plan to produce more content. And only 26% of law firm marketers say they have a documented content strategy. What can you do here to stand out from the pack? Create smart content and have a strategy that is agreed upon by decision makers and the marketing team.
  • Beware of the invisible user trend: 77 percent of in-house counsel use social media in listen-only mode – while only 27 percent are disseminating information and engaging with other users. This may cause the number of likes on your pages to be low or for it to seem like no one is engaging with your content – but they are.
  • In-house counsel want content that helps them do their jobs. More than ¾ of respondents most value utility in the content they consume – ahead of timeliness, reliable sources and compelling headlines.
  • And they want it in the form of articles, alerts and newsletters, respectively.
  • Email works – when it’s good. That’s a huge opportunity to reach clients and prospects, and to stand out from the noise, by creating email alerts that deliver on the qualities in-house lawyers are looking for.
  • Brevity matters. Nearly a third of in-house counsel value shorter content, while only five percent value longer pieces. They want client alerts to be brief.
  • Podcasts show promise. More than a quarter of respondents put podcasts among their preferred content vehicles – ahead of video and surprising for a relatively new medium. Audio content gives your target audience a way to engage with your firm during their commute or workout.
OB-Blog-Curation

Curating content gives you the ability to cover a much broader set of topics than you would be able to cover on your own if you were to depend solely on writing articles yourself for your content strategy.

Curating content provides you with the opportunity to connect with other thought leaders. It also shows you are up-to-date with the latest trends, research and concepts, even if you didn’t develop them yourself.

Often when you share someone else’s content, the author will thank you and/or repost your post. The author might even check out other content pieces that you created and share them as well.

Tools to Help You Curate Content

  • Curata will help you more effectively gather and use curated content, as well as create content with contributors across your entire team.
  • Flipboard enables you to take curated content and create a mini publication on the topic of your choice.
  • Pocket allows you to save content in a single place whenever you find it and then use it at a future date.
Inspire

I came across a Twitter feed with great nuggets of inspirational advice that I wanted to share with those of you who could use some extra inspiration and motivation. Many of the posts are dedicated to simple things we can do to be better, kinder people and give back to others – all great things we should incorporate into our every day lives.

The account is @LollyDaskal and her good advice includes:

  1. Forgive and forget
  2. Find the good in people
  3. Pay good deeds forward
  4. Make someone smile
  5. Extend a helping hand
  6. Dwelling on the past won’t get you to your future
  7. Think before you speak
  8. Slow down before you speed up
  9. Don’t say yes when you mean no
  10. Feel grateful
  11. You are not your title
  12. You can never go wrong from being helpful
  13. Being calm is a superpower that allows your mind to find solutions
  14. Tough times say a lot about who you are
  15. See the good in everything, keep your promises and don’t cross anyone
  16. Things that matter: Support others to succeed, give your undivided attention and exceed expectations
  17. Express gratitude, cultivate optimism, avoid overthinking and practice kindness

I’m sure we could all benefit from Lolly’s smart tips – even if we just did one of these things each day.

E2D9C9A5-793E-4340-A2B2-3F9661C1ACC2

Content marketing can take up a lot of time and effort. I wanted to share some ideas on what actually can make your content marketing efforts successful and worthwhile – just keep in mind that they may take time to show real ROI but I have seen content lead to new business over and over, so be patient! And remember that staying top of mind with your target audiences is key and providing value-added content is one way in which you can do this and brand yourself as a subject-matter expert in your area of the law.

  • Strong headlines are key. They capture the attention of your readers and make them want to click through.
  • Make sure your mailing lists have clean data. Or else your campaigns won’t actually reach anyone.
  • Remember that great content invites followers and potential leads/referrals and clients.
  • Good is often good enough – don’t spend forever perfecting a piece of content. Time is often of the essence to get a piece published.
  • Look to see what your competitors are writing about and do it better than them. I recommend following 5-10 of your competitors and track what they write about. Follow their blogs and their LinkedIn accounts.
  • Recycle your greatest hits – so many firms take the time to create great content but they only post it once to social – huge mistake. No one is following your feed closely enough to notice if you reuse your content. Change up the wording and imagery and voila – you have a new piece of content.
  • Study your analytics to get a better sense of what content is resonating with your target audiences and what’s not. Make sure you share this info with authors as it inspires and educated them.
  • Only focus on the social platforms where your clients and prospects are – don’t feel like you need to post content to all social channels. You should only dedicate your time and efforts to those platforms they are using – with LinkedIn being the most important one.
  • I’m a firm believer that you should post nothing to social media without an image. Why? Because social media posts with images gain more views and engagement, period. Anyone can incorporate visuals into their social media strategy, you just need to be creative and resourceful. You can easily reuse and repurpose images that you already have, and resize them using tools right on your smartphone. In addition, there are many photo and online design tools that enable you to create images for free or at a low cost.
  • A smart strategic decision and investment you can make in your content efforts is to pursue opportunities to have your content published in third-party trade journals, websites and publications focused on your target industry. By doing this your target audience will grow to know, like and trust you as well.
  • Utilize content syndicators like JD Supra. Many law firms (and their lawyers) invest considerable time writing great content, but are disappointed by the results. Either their thought leadership efforts don’t lead to new business, or they fail to garner media attention or the attention of clients/prospects. This isn’t necessarily because the content is poorly written. Often it is simply because not enough of the right people, your target readers, have the chance to see the work. Fact is, we operate in a competitive and saturated market and simply getting someone to open your email and read your content is very difficult. So, what can you do to stand out from your peers? Bring in the special forces like JD Supra to take your content efforts to the next level. In simple terms, JD Supra helps its clients leverage thought leadership to effectively create new business, media attention and networking opportunities.
  • Consider utilizing new media and new mediums to engage with audiences such as video and podcasts, which can capture the attention of new followers and lead to new business.

Happy content creating!