If you’re ready to start doing more marketing but you aren’t sure where to start or exactly where you should focus, here are some ideas for things you can do that will have a strong impact on your brand building and business development efforts.

These branding and business development tips will work for any size law firm or professional service organization.

  1. Create a strong LinkedIn headline and About section (with keywords to improve your searchability)
  2. Google yourself regularly and set up Google Alerts for your top clients and prospects. Information is power here when it comes to knowing about your clients and prospects, plus it’s free. This is your professional brand, so make sure you are managing it.
  3. Reevaluate your business goals for the year and set achievable ones for 2022 – message me if you’d like a copy of my template.
  4. Reconnect with key former clients and referral sources – if you don’t stay top of mind with them you run the risk that they can forget about you, so don’t let them!
  5. Commit to writing a client alert, a blog post, an article or all of these (helpful, educational content is a great hook to reach out to a prospect or client)
  6. Learn how to use hashtags on LinkedIn (I have a free upcoming course on this – register here)
  7. Make a connections plan for LinkedIn to strategically increase your network – remember that the more connections you have the more people who will see your content!
  8. Look at the analytics of past blogs, emails and client alerts to refine your content strategy – and do this often! This information is so important to ensuring that you are creating content that your audience actually wants to see and that you aren’t wasting your time or theirs.
  9. Send a Happy New Year’s check email to key contacts – sending an email to your VIP contacts to wish them a happy new year and to “check in” is a great way to stay top of mind and show you care.
  10. Repurpose your top-performing content from the past and evergreen posts (there’s no need to reinvent the wheel all the time!)
  11. Create an email and social media post on your top content of 2021 – you can do this for: webinars, videos, blog posts, articles, email campaigns and social media posts – this is a great excuse to repackage your top-performing posts
  12. Plan out your social media strategy for Q1 – think about your goals and what did well last year (see point #11).
    • Also note the lawyers and other key employees you want to highlight as well as any practices, initiatives and industries on which you want to focus.
    • Build in hashtag holidays, monthly holidays such as Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Pride, etc.
    • As well as TBT/FBF/ICYMI (in case you missed it) posts too in order to highlight past content and milestones.
  13. Update your web site bio and matter list to reflect what you do as clients and prospects look at your bio to confirm that you can do the kinds of things they need after someone gives them your name or they hear about you. If you don’t say you do something, they may not think you do.
    • Bonus – updating your bio will also enhance your SEO and searchability so make sure to use keywords to help boost your search results.
  14. Update all practice area/industry descriptions for web site and pitches
  15. Repurpose past videos and webinars into short video segments for social media – you no doubt have great content on your web site and You Tube channel already. The issue is that they’re probably too long. Most people don’t want to watch a webinar or CLE program that is 60 minutes long – so break it up for them into smaller segments.
    • The best part about this is that you wind up with lots of content. It takes time to do this but it’s worth the effort. I recommend hiring a video editor to help you do this. It’s best to work with them and let them know exactly which segments you want as well as to create a title and end screen for each clip.
    • Video content is so important today and ranks highly on Google – so make this a priority in your content marketing strategy.
  16. Clean up and add new contacts to your email lists – your email list is so important – spend the time to make sure you have the right contacts on it and that you segment your lists to ensure that you are sending the right content to people on the right topics.
  17. Commit to an industry-related activity- for an industry or bar association committee, social cause, pro bono project or alumni association. This is a great way to network and also get invited to speak on panels.

Don’t feel like you have to implement all of these strategies at once.

You’re much better off if you do a couple of them and then save the rest for later.

They’re here to show you what you CAN do.

But do commit to doing something – they’re an investment in YOU and your business.

Follow me at Stefanie Marrone and Stefanie Marrone Consulting | The Social Media Butterfly on LinkedIn, and on YouTube for more content like this and sign up for my e-newsletter to find out about my upcoming webinars.