Remember When?
Remember the old days when advertising a product or service used to be the only way you could be certain your message was being communicated properly? I helped buy tens of thousands of dollars of TV, radio, and billboards every month when I was with Time Warner because it made the phones ring. That, along with our door-to-door salespeople, was how we told our story.
Legal Marketing
When I started in-house as a senior legal marketer in 1997, we could write press releases, but we couldn’t always count on the journalist or reporter delivering the information just as it was written, or to give credit where it was deserved. At that firm, which was Baker & Daniels, we constantly tried to get on the radar of those who wrote about what law firms do to help clients. We had someone in-house who was dedicated to community and public relations. As we were told by reporters more than once, it’s not their job to promote our law firm. It’s their job to report the news.
Never Before
We still have the advertising and marketing tools above at our disposal, and sometimes they even do a pretty good job for us, but we still aren’t sure our messages are getting across to our target audiences, our clients, potential clients, referral sources, and media the way WE want them to. The good news is that we now have new tools in our arsenal.
Never before have we had the tools we have today to send our messages:
- The way we want to send them
- When we want to send them
- When our target audiences might need them
- As creatively as we would like to send them
- In as many formats as we want to send them, and
- When situations occur that call for them to be sent
In A Perfect World
In a perfect world, we would be able to meet everyone we are interested in doing business with face-to-face, look them in the eye, shake their hands genuinely, and talk to them about:
- Their business
- The state of their industry
- What is threatening their business
- What is causing their business to grow
- What opportunities lie ahead for them, and
- What they need to be cautious about to survive in this competitive, and sometimes dangerous, world
Unfortunately, that is not always possible or efficient if our target audience is:
- Hard to get a hold of
- Across the country or world
- Not yet open to taking a phone call or meeting from us
- Is overwhelmed with work demands
- Or has no idea we even exist
This is where content marketing comes in to help us control all of that.
What Is Content Marketing?
It’s not a magic term. It is what it sounds like. I’ll make this simple, and get right to the point.
Content is the words and messages you deliver.
Content Marketing is the use or marketing of those words to reach other people.
Content Marketing is the act of placing digital breadcrumbs in the paths of your target audiences so they will, at some point, be able to find you.
Content Marketing is your way of doing what we discussed above. It is shaking the digital hand of your current and potential clients, journalists, reporters, and referral sources.
What Do You Create Content About?
Content marketing allows you to talk to these target audiences about:
- Their business
- The state of their industry
- What is threatening their business
- What is causing their business to grow
- What opportunities lie ahead for them, and
- What they need to be cautious about to survive in this competitive, and sometimes dangerous, world
Does that sound familiar? It should. Those are the things we discussed above that all of us would like to do if we had the time, dollars, connections and resources needed to do so.
It’s time to make sure you’re creating the content that serves as the digital breadcrumbs and messages needed to let clients know who you are and what you can do for and with them.
Let’s Create A Plan
If you haven’t already, let’s create a plan to virtually:
- Shake their hands
- Look them in the eyes
- Find out what’s going on in their businesses
- Discover what’s on the horizon that will impact their bottom line
Then, I want you to go about communicating with those people about all of these things in a very deliberate, efficient, planned way that will enable you to match their needs to what you know might be helpful to them.
Oh, and don’t forget to allow your personality to come across when you’re marketing your content. This always has been and always will be about creating relationships.
Nancy Myrland is a Marketing, Business Development, Content, Social & Digital Media Speaker, Trainer & Advisor, helping lawyers and legal marketers grow by integrating all marketing disciplines in order to maximize business development efforts to grow their practices. Known as the LinkedIn Coach For Lawyers, she is a frequent LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook for Business trainer, as well as a content marketing specialist. She helps lawyers, law firms, and legal marketers learn and implement marketing and business development efforts that are more relevant to their current and potential clients. As an early and constant adopter of social and digital media and technology, she also helps firms with blogging, podcasts, video marketing, voice marketing, flash briefings, and livestreaming. She also helps lead law firms through their online social media strategy when dealing with high-stakes, visible cases.
If you would like to reserve an hour of Nancy’s time to begin talking strategy or think through an issue you are having, you can do that here.
