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There are a lot of law firm blogs competing for market share, they are a huge commitment and not all blogs wind up being successful.

So are they worth it? The short answer, yes, IF you can find a niche and a strong team committed to its success.

Blogs are great branding and lead generation tools – they can often lead to speaking engagements as well as new clients (the holy grail of content efforts). As Susan Kostal writes in her latest article for Attorney at Work, “blogging is also a significant equalizer for those in small and midsize firms. With consistency, many authors from less well-known firms compete more than ably against those in national brand-name firms.” 

Stefanie LinkedIn Speaking at LMATech
That's me at LMA Tech in Chicago!

Use LinkedIn today. Not tomorrow. It is THE most important networking tool for professionals and will help you quickly build and grow relationships, strengthen your brand and stay top of mind with key individuals in your professional network.

Today, networking online is just as important as making in-person connections. And in the professional world, LinkedIn continues to be the most important social media channel for business development.

Don’t forget that your LinkedIn profile is often the first or second Google search result when someone searches for you online. LinkedIn is powerful, period. 

Lately I’ve been exploring concepts related to how to effectively engage with clients, prospects and other key influencers using social media to both strengthen your brand but more importantly, to generate new business.

At the end of the day, every single social media marketing effort should be designed to support your firm’s business development efforts. That being said, not every post can focus on the business of the firm. Sometimes the highest-rated posts are actually the ones where a firm showcases its “softer” side. For example, pro bono and community service activities, as well as the people of the firm engaging together.

It’s time to get excited: For those of you who manage your company’s LinkedIn pages, I have some really great news (in case you didn’t already discover this yourself): You can now edit posts on company pages!

This limitation on company pages was a huge pet peeve of mine (and overall grievance on LinkedIn), because previously, if you saw a typo, or wanted to make any kind of change to a post, you needed to delete the entire post and then post it again, leading to lost page views and analytics, not to mention a loss of your precious time.

While users have been able to easily edit their personal posts, the same option did not exist for company posts. That is, until now. Now to edit a post on your LinkedIn company page, just go to the top right of the post to where the three little dots are and you’ll now see “Edit Update” as the very first option (see screenshot above). Voilà! 

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to attend (and speak) at the LMA 2018 Annual Conference, which is THE largest annual meeting of legal marketing and business professionals in the industry.

If your experience was anything like mine, you learned a lot, you made many new valuable connections, you reconnected with industry friends, and you spent a lot of time in the exhibit hall talking to leading service providers about their products and technologies. You likely saw Mario Lopez and quite a few wrestlers in town for Wrestlemania in the common spaces at the Hyatt Regency, and you returned to the office with a ton of information to digest and ideas to implement, which is exciting but also quite overwhelming.

client centric 2

At the heart of this year’s Legal Marketing Association’s 2017 Southeast Conference was the importance of integrating the voice of the client in all marketing and business development efforts.

The message: firms that are successfully able to adopt the client-centric mindset and delight their clients will have a significant advantage over their competitors. 

It’s important to remember that the role of the client can be different things to different professionals. For example, if you are an in-house legal marketer, your clients are not only your traditional external clients, but also the lawyers at your firm, your colleagues in other administrative departments, your COO, etc. And if you are a business partner/service provider, anyone and everyone can potentially be a client or a referral source.

I was lucky enough to once again have the opportunity to speak at LMASE17 (more about that a bit later). A talented group of industry speakers provided attendees with actionable and innovative ideas under the conference’s theme of “mapping the future.” Here are some highlights: