In today’s saturated and competitive legal market, it’s just not enough to be the very best at what you do, sitting behind your desk churning out work day in day out, to keep bringing in new business and to stay top of mind with clients, prospects and referrals.
Your competitors are likely doing more, and
I recently returned from Atlanta where I attended and spoke at the 2019 Legal Marketing Association Annual Conference, which is the annual industry gathering for legal marketing and business development professionals.
If your experience was like mine, you gained many new insights that you’re excited to implement at your firm, you made new valuable connections, reignited existing relationships, participated in online conversations at #LMA19 and spent time in the exhibit hall talking to service providers about their products and technologies.
I always try to attend the sessions that will enable me to obtain insights into what clients need and want, as well as anything that will help me gain an advantage over competitors, and with that in mind, I’d like to share a few key takeaways and insights from my LMA19 experience. This year, one of the major highlights for me was the general counsel panel. The speakers had so much to share and what they said was eye opening.
Here are some key takeaways from my latest JD Supra article on “What Clients Want and Need Today From Law Firms – Key Takeaways from the 2019 LMA Annual Conference.” Read the full article for much more from #LMA19.
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I recently had the opportunity to participate in an interview series with the Legal Marketing Association where they asked some of the speakers of the upcoming LMA19 conference to respond to questions on why they submitted to speak at the LMA Annual Conference, what they hope attendees will learn from their presentation, what they think are the keys for success for legal marketers today and which other sessions they are most excited to attend. Here are my responses. I’m looking forward to seeing many of you in Atlanta on April 8-10, and I hope you will join me and Jennifer Carr for our deep-dive workshop session on April 10 at 1:30pm on “Beyond Branding: Aligning Social Media Strategy With Business Development Goals.” Learn more about the session.
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I can’t wait to speak at the 2019 Legal Marketing Association Annual Conference on April 10 at 1:30pm in Atlanta on “Beyond Branding: Aligning Social Media Strategy with Business Development Goals.” The conference is now less than three weeks away, and while I still have so much to do to prepare for my presentation, I
I recently heard a very inspiring story about how a client referral came from a conversation that a lawyer had with the cleaning service employee who was assigned to his floor. They had grown somewhat friendly over the course of a year through casual conversations, and it turned out that the janitor’s brother had growing
I have a few favorite go-to content marketing tricks and tips that help guide every post and article I create that help me engage my target audiences. They also make the content I have work smarter and harder for me and my team, which makes us more efficient and strategic. Incorporating these tips into your content strategy will help enhance lead generation and brand building (but don’t tell eveyrone about them – let’s keep them our little secret)!
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It’s not always easy to develop a steady stream of strong content to engage with your clients, prospects and other target audiences, especially when there’s so much competition out there from other firms that are content powerhouses and so little time to capture the attention of your audience.
You also don’t want to be the firm that posts content just for the sake of posting content – you always want your articles and posts to be meaningful, targeted and client-focused – remember, always think quality over quantity. You can also use what you do have more efficiently to give you much more bang for your buck.
Content marketers now have a new way of reaching their target audiences on LinkedIn using live video.
Recently, LinkedIn, the most powerful social network for professionals, added a livestreaming option in beta to a select group of users.
Called “LinkedIn Live,” the platform will provide its 600 million plus members and businesses the option to share and stream live video content such as Q&As, events, conferences, earnings calls, award ceremonies, company announcements and more.
According to Social Media Today, it makes perfect sense for LinkedIn to put increased emphasis on video content because its users are 20x more likely to share a video on the platform than any other type of post (wow!). To further support video on its platform, LinkedIn also launched video sponsored content and video for company pages early last year. The addition of LinkedIn Live will also enable LinkedIn to build on the ‘record levels’ of engagement that it says it is currently seeing on the platform.
LinkedIn has lagged behind its competitors when it came to providing users with video content options. This is interesting because because the platform says that video is the fastest-growing format on its platform alongside original written work, shared news and other content, so it seems like it’s in LinkedIn’s best interests to embrace in the technology that will support what its users want.
Launching first in the United States, LinkedIn Live is invite-only for now. In coming weeks, LinkedIn will also post a contact form for others who want to join. It’s not clear when and if LinkedIn will make it possible for everyone to create LinkedIn Live videos, but it is expected that is what will occur given how they rolled out LinkedIn Publisher.
So what can law firms do with LinkedIn Live? Here are some ideas (just keep in mind that your content must have a topical/timely aspect to it in order for it to be worth going live).
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A few thoughts on LinkedIn:
Today, most people do not send an email when they move jobs, instead they use LinkedIn to notify their professional network. It’s up to you to do the due diligence to find where they landed and add that info to Outlook and your CRM.
LinkedIn gives you great reasons to
Quite possibly the worst thing about dealing with the loss of someone you loved is the anguish when you forget that you just can’t call or text them to tell or ask them something.
On a weekly basis, I think of things – an impossibly funny situation that happened to me on the NYC subway that morning, a question about a family recipe I am about to screw up, general family gossip or advice – that I desperately want to discuss with my mom, and then I painfully realize that I will never be able to do that again with her.
Three years ago today, I lost my mom Lucille to Multiple Myeloma, a rare blood cancer of plasma cells. It causes cancer cells to accumulate in the bone marrow, where they crowd out healthy blood cells and lead to a lot of terrible things, such as irreparable damage to the kidneys, heart, lungs and bones.
My mom had this awful cancer for many years and responded well to treatment for many years from the best oncologists in New York City – a cocktail of groundbreaking drugs, chemotherapy, even an auto stem cell transplant – but then just when she thought she was in the clear, it came back with a vengeance.
Then there is a dear friend of mine who lost her husband (who was also a close friend) at the age of 35 last summer. She is now a 32-year-old widow. They were married for less than two years. He was an accomplished law professor who graduated first in his class at law school. He was also an opera singer. For months I have been trying to make sense of his passing, and how life can be so cruel and unfair, and then so wonderful sometimes. I am in awe of my friend’s strength and cannot even imagine what she carries around with her every day.
Lately I feel as if everyone I know has experienced a personal tragedy or profound loss of some sort – the death of parent, a beloved pet, a grandparent, a miscarriage, the diagnosis of a terminal illness – maybe it’s our age. Maybe it’s bad luck. Whatever it is, it just plain sucks.
Here’s the thing though – you can choose to wallow in tragedy, or you can choose to make hardships and the worst times of your life teaching moments and turn them into something good. You’d be surprised just how resilient each of us are if we just believe it.
Also, some of us must choose to be happy at certain points in our lives in order to turn the tide around or just to carry on and not to fall into a dark hole of despair. Happiness doesn’t always come easy to everyone all the time (more on that in a bit). Sometimes a tragedy can serve as the catalyst to cause us to reevaluate what we want from our lives.
Unfortunately, time doesn’t stop just because we are going through a personal tragedy. The sun still rises and sets, and we all still must get up and put on our game faces and go to work, and take care of our families, and just keep going no matter how hard it is.
This article is intended to help those who are facing something profoundly difficult in their personal lives and those around them so that those people can hopefully become more understanding and empathetic toward others, because you just never know what someone else is going though. So many successful people are trying to hold it together when inside they are struggling with loss and grief. I just wanted them to know that it’s okay and that they weren’t alone in this feeling.