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. Keep in mind that they may take time to show real ROI, but I have seen thought leadership content lead to new business over and over. Remember that great content invites followers and potential leads/referrals and clients – that is how you achieve content marketing success.

While it is a little more challenging to build relationships that will turn into referrals and new clients today due to social distancing, it is not impossible by any means. It just requires us to pivot what we were doing before the pandemic (taking clients and prospects to lunch or events, going to in-person networking events and conferences) and conducting most of our networking and brand building online or by phone. It involves shifting to doing more thought leadership and relying on social media and webinars.

When done correctly, these tools can help you cast an even wider net on your marketing and business development efforts than before due to the vast reach of the social platforms. Your goal is to stay top of mind and to be helpful. That’s it. Here are some ideas on how to incorporate these tools into your marketing and business development strategy and turn your connections into new business.

This is not the year to take a break from social media during the summer. Instead this is the time to focus on your business development and branding efforts.

I don’t know anyone right now especially (or ever) who would say they have enough clients or work. I think everyone is nervous about the economy, the ability to maintain their current volume of work, bring in future clients and support their people.

That being said, it’s incredibly important to ensure your current clients are happy and that you are consistently generating new sources of leads and referrals.

Here are 25 ideas on how to do that, which now involves shifting your strategy from in-person networking and client entertaining to having a strong online presence and thought leadership platform. If you have never used LinkedIn, written an article or blog post or spoken at a webinar, now is the time to pivot to doing all of these. It is never too early or late to start marketing yourself or your firm.