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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.

Connections

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.

25 Ways to Boost Your Business and Brand During Summer Downtime

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.

Email marketing should be a core part of everyone’s marketing strategy.

Email marketing is still the most effective marketing channel surpassing social media and SEO. It is simply because people use email more than other platforms.

I find so many B2B businesses aren’t sending emails as often to communicate with their clients and prospects and are instead relying on social media to distribute their content and other information– and this is a big mistake.

There is no better and direct way to reach clients and prospects (if your contact list is updated and segmented) than email. It is particularly important for boutique, small- and mid-size firms to utilize email to stay top of mind with their referrals and clients.

Why? Because it helps you stay top of mind. It also puts the content directly into their inboxes, your name appears front and center in their inbox – whereas on LinkedIn or any other social platform, they may or may not see your post due to whether they are on that social platform at that moment, whether that piece of content gets buried in their news feed due to their settings and LinkedIn’s tricky algorithm.

As I mentioned above, you simply don’t know if or when someone is on social media at any given moment on any given day. And that means they may or may not see your content. But we know business professionals are on their email all day long. That’s why sometimes good old email is the most effective and direct way to reach your target audience.

So, if you write a substantive blog post or article (which you should be doing) or are hosting a virtual event and want to make sure your clients and prospects know about it, make sure to send it directly to your mailing list so you increase the likelihood that they will see it.

You should use email to build upon existing relationships with your clients and prospects by providing relevant, valuable information.

Remember, your clients, prospects, referrals, alumni, media and others who are on your lists actually prefer to communicate with your company through email because it is permission based. The people on your list actually signed up because they want to get updates from you.

A great benefit of email marketing is that it’s incredibly easy to track your ROI. Everything is trackable with the use of email marketing software so you can determine who is opening your emails, who is clicking onto your site through your emails and more.

Thank you to the New York Law Journal and Mid-Market Report for publishing my new article, “20 Ways Small- and Mid-Size Firms Can Appropriately Market Themselves During the Pandemic.”

Your most important job right now is to lay the foundation for when we return to “normal” and also to be ready, willing and able to assist your clients during this time of great change, confusion and stress. Empathy is the single most important characteristic you can have right now to build stronger relationships.

In case you are looking for some “homework” in the marketing and business development area, here are a few ideas to keep you busy during this period.