My team and I were having a status meeting with a client recently, to look at the first six or so months of a marketing and business development program. He already had a well-deserved reputation as an accomplished criminal defense strategist and a skilled trial lawyer within the criminal defense community, particularly in his geographic region. Our LinkedIn-based campaign had as its goals to reinforce his reputation, highlight his expertise and increase his visibility with a wider audience of potential referral sources. The core components of our strategy included updating his LinkedIn profile to show his experience as well as his approach and work style, expanding his connections on the networking platform and publishing his monthly criminal law articles in a LinkedIn newsletter and on his account.

The legal industry — Big Law, in particular — is having a moment in the media spotlight. The glare is starting to feel like an interrogation light shining directly into our eyes.

Then there’s the economy. Are we headed for a recession? Trade wars? A market crash?

Clients are nervous. Lawyers are anxious. Firm leadership is skittish. Everyone needs reassurance, but that’s in short supply at the moment.

For lawyers and firms, and their marketing professionals, now is the time to up their go-to-market efforts.

Wait. The world feels like it’s on fire, and I’m suggesting … marketing?

In past articles I’ve talked about different marketing and business development topics and (hopefully) given some practical advice on strategy and tactics. But, often, there is a big gap between strategy and implementation—or between “here’s what you should do” and “here’s how it works in practice.” Lawyers I’ve worked with have told me that sometimes the gap feels so large, the task of marketing themselves so overwhelming, or the possibility of success so abstract, that they throw up their hands and do nothing. 

I get it. Why spend time and energy on marketing tasks that you’re not sure are the right ones or what success would even look like? 

Instead of theory and strategy, let’s talk real life lessons in marketing and business development in the form of a case study on marketing and business development for a criminal defense lawyer.

Tap, tap, tap! Is this thing on? 

Does it sometimes feel as if your marketing is falling flat? You’re putting out insightful content —blogging or writing articles. You’re speaking on panels and giving presentations. Perhaps you’re a regular presence on LinkedIn, commenting and even posting a few times a week. 

Still, you don’t seem to be getting any traction and certainly not any clients or work from your efforts. It’s discouraging. 

If you’ve got the marketing blues, I have some good news. Your marketing probably isn’t “wrong”; it’s just not reaching the right audiences. 

At its most basic, your marketing objectives are to establish your expertise (through your content), enhance awareness (with the right audiences) and build trust (with those who make or influence the hiring decisions).

If your marketing is focused on showcasing your knowledge, skills and experience — your expertise — but it isn’t consistently reaching or engaging the people who would hire or refer you you’re missing two of the three critical marks. 

The season of giving is upon us!

The period from Thanksgiving to New Year’s is full of opportunities for giving and receiving all kinds of presents, donations and tokens of appreciation.

There are a variety of holidays that involve gifts large and small — Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Festivus (the original Festivus, not the “Seinfeld” version, included small gifts, although we could consider the airing of grievances to be gifts). We are encouraged to participate in food, clothing and toy drives; give generously on Giving Tuesday; or consider end-of-tax-year charitable donations.

Gift-giving guides for every kind of recipient abound, from what to give the pickiest of relatives and friends to the best gifts for your office Secret Santa, Pollyanna or Yankee Swap. There are even gift guides for how to treat yourself while you’re buying for others (a trend I highly approve of). 

In the spirit of the holiday season, I thought I would offer my own version: The Legal Marketer’s Gift Guide for Lawyers, a curated list of some of the best marketing-focused gifts lawyers can give themselves, their clients and others.

To criminal defense lawyers, the idea of "sales" might seem unrelated—perhaps even antithetical—to your daily practice. You would not be alone in that thinking. Many lawyers and firm leaders across practice areas are uncomfortable with the idea of proactively selling their services. In fact, this discomfort has deep roots in the legal profession, where law has long been viewed as a noble calling rather than a commercial enterprise. In today’s legal market, however, embracing a mindset that views proactive business development (another way to say sales) as a collaborative process that focuses on client service and trust building—can improve not only your current client relationships, but also your marketing and business development efforts.

Who are your ideal clients and why do they (or should they) hire you?

This simple but key question for marketing and business development is often deceptively challenging to answer. Most lawyers and practice groups can describe the general category of their target clients — Fortune 100 companies, high-net-worth individuals, private equity funds, technology startups, advertising agencies, commercial real estate developers, pharmaceutical and life sciences companies, etc. But they often can’t identify with specificity which prospects within those categories would be ideal clients for their practice.

As a result, they are likely spending time, energy and money marketing to an audience that might be too broad, using messaging that doesn’t resonate with — and perhaps doesn’t even reach — the clients they want to attract. It may also mean taking on work for less-than-ideal clients and missing opportunities to build client relationships with gold-standard clients that could not only lead to better and more satisfying work but also open doors to other similar clients.

Developing client personas can help maximize marketing and business development resources as well as boost profitability by bringing in more and better (and perhaps better paying) clients.

I’m a swear-word enthusiast. I actually have that in my LinkedIn profile headline.

To know me is to know my creative use of the F-word — noun, verb, adjective, adverb, expletive.

I love a good unmentionable word. 

And I’ve noticed a taboo term popping up lately in legal service marketing — the “S-word”…

Sales.

There, I said it.

The idea that lawyers and firms don’t — or shouldn’t — “sell” to clients and prospects remains widespread.

I think it’s time we change this perspective. It’s neither practical nor sustainable in a legal services marketplace, where competition to keep clients and attract new ones is intense and the ability to stand out from the crowd is increasingly challenging for both lawyers and firms.

It’s also not what clients want or what serves them best in the long run.

In a recent blog post, we talked about how to make the most of the annual process of gathering the matters and references needed for submissions to research-based legal awards and directories. (You can read our blog post here: https://www.create-cmm.com/blog/making-the-most-of-rankings-and-awards.)

In this blog post, we’re giving you tips for getting the most visibility out of your recognitions, whether that’s one or many this awards season.

To truly get the most visibility out of rankings, recognitions and awards, you need to do some planning before the first submission packet is ever uploaded.

Every time a marketing content writer takes on a client in a new industry, we’re faced with learning at least one new set of business jargon— the client’s jargon — and often the industry-speak of the client’s clients as well.

The question is: How much jargon should we use in the content we create for our clients?

On the one hand, our job as marketing content writers is to help our clients show that they speak their clients’ language. On the other hand, peppering copy with too many industry-specific terms can alienate even the intended audience, not to mention the broader audience.

Jargon refers to terms and expressions used within a profession or industry that may be difficult for those outside the industry to understand. It often takes the form of shorthand for more complex processes. Often, jargon isn’t too difficult to figure out. For example, “capability uplift” is a human resource term that means investment in training and development to help employees build skills and knowledge. In the website development world, the term “breadcrumbs” is short for a site’s secondary navigation system that shows users the location of a webpage in relation to the rest of the site.

At the end of 2023, BTI Consulting Group released its yearly in-depth look at the legal services market, “BTI Practice Outlook 2024: Navigating Legal Spending and Needs in the New Unpredictable World.” BTI’s report (and follow-on webinar) suggested an increased demand for outside counsel hiring, predicting that this area of legal spend is on track to set another record in 2024. The anticipated growth is being driven by increased regulatory concerns, the rapid adoption of technology—including generative AI—across industries, employee activism, and the need for companies to be both resilient and innovative in the current economy. The report identified six industries (high tech, pharma, financial services, health care, private equity and food/agritech) and six practice areas (labor and employment, cybersecurity, commercial litigation, bet-the-company matters (including regulatory enforcement matters), class actions and intellectual property litigation) that BTI predicts are poised for rapid growth in legal spending.

Based on research interviews with general counsel and chief legal officers, the report also concluded that while clients are open to hiring new firms, there is a desire to give more work to a core group of their existing firms, in what BTI is calling “quiet convergence.”

A perennial question in legal services marketing is whether recognitions and rankings such as Chambers and Legal 500 actually have any impact on legal hiring. Just this week alone, I listened to two different guests on the same legal marketing podcast discuss this question. (The upshot: rankings are not entirely inconsequential, but they are not as impactful as the ranking organizations want you to believe.)

Participating in these programs is time-consuming and labor-intensive for lawyers and marketing professionals. Beyond the costs of those resources (or the cost of hiring an outsourced resource to assist with the submissions process), these programs are becoming increasingly expensive in other ways. Call it “shrinkflation.” While research-based ranking programs are typically not “pay to play” in that you don’t pay to submit, what you receive “for free” seems to be shrinking as the organizations running these programs offer more and costlier paid add-ons—enhanced firm and lawyer profiles, client and market intelligence reports, and extra “tools” for better submission development and management, for example.

If you’re not actively using LinkedIn, you’re missing out on opportunities to connect with clients and referral sources.

The No. 1 professional social media site, LinkedIn has evolved well beyond its roots as a digital job board in the almost 20 years it’s been around. As of June 2022, LinkedIn had more than 190 million users in the United States and 830 million worldwide, professionals from 149 industry categories, including Information Technology and Services (No. 1 as of January 2022), Hospital & Health Care (2), Construction (3), Financial Services (6), Accounting (7), Government Administration (11) and Banking (13) in the top 20 alone.

Your clients and referral sources are on LinkedIn, and so are your competitors (Law is No. 39).

You need to be there too.

Typos can be funny—funny when you discover them in someone else’s content, that is. Not so much when they are in yours.

On one hand, typos in any form of written content are inevitable—no content is 100% perfect, 100% of the time. On the other hand, recurring typos can damage a brand’s credibility.

A road sign recently erected in Pennsylvania pointing the way to Central Philadelphia misspelled the first word as “Cenrtal” (https://6abc.com/post/new-philadelphia-sign-misspelled-cottman-avenue-state-road/14994878/). The typo made international headlines, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation apologized and quickly corrected the sign, and life went on. Mistakes happen—not often writ that large—but they happen.

At a recent social event I attended, I met a lawyer — let’s call him Mark. When Mark heard that I run a content marketing agency focusing on legal services, he chuckled and said, “I bet you run into a lot of lawyers who think they know how to do marketing better than you do.” Before I could assure him that this was rarely a problem and that I very much enjoyed working with lawyers and law firms, Mark leaned in close to tell me that, in his opinion, “most law firms are doing it wrong” and “should be focusing on business development rather than marketing.” After imparting this piece of wisdom, he sat back with a satisfied smile.

As ironic as the scenario might have been, Mark’s suggestion started me thinking.

I read a statistic this week that hurts my marketing professional heart.

An estimated 60% to 70% of B2B marketing content goes unused.

Ouch.

The statistic actually refers to finalized content that then doesn’t get used in the marketing and sales process. It doesn’t include content that never gets over the finish line, for one reason or another.

It’s a tremendous waste of time, resources, money and good, effective content.

But it doesn’t surprise me. I regularly see all kinds of marketing content, at various stages of completion, go into a content black hole, never to see the light of day — and never to reach and influence its intended audience (which is, after all, the point of content).

Blogging has been a hot topic among the firms, lawyers and legal marketing professionals I work with lately—and for very good reason.

Done strategically and consistently, blogging can be an excellent visibility and engagement tool.

“Blogging” at its most basic is writing and regularly posting content in one dedicated location where your clients, prospects and referral sources can find it. It can help you connect, build and deepen your relationship with your target audiences—to be seen as a trusted resource for excellent information. Blogging regularly allow you to showcase your expertise and experience, as well as stay in front of the people who make or influence legal hiring decisions.

So, should you blog?

Maybe…

The theme for this week is rules, why they matter and when you can—and should—break them.

Earlier this week I worked with a lawyer on a firm-branded alert covering regulatory developments in a particular financial market sector that’s in the headlines right now. The copy was both informative and brimming with wit and humor around what the lawyer saw as regulators getting (perhaps unnecessarily) hot under the collar. I thought the piece was great and told her so. She promised the final draft by the end of the day, after the head of her department reviewed it. But when I received the final version a couple of hours later, all of the humor was gone—as was any hint of insight and opinion from the previous draft. All that was left was a straight, lawyerly reporting of the facts.

Effective legal marketing requires determining the right mix of marketing tactics and strategies for your firm. One way to sift through the options is to look at them in terms of push vs. pull marketing. Push marketing — sometimes called outbound marketing — involves proactively reaching out to potential clients and referral sources, presenting them with tailored content designed to capture their interest. On the other hand, pull — or inbound — marketing focuses on drawing clients to your firm by offering valuable content that addresses their needs and interests. For law firms, an approach that combines both can be a robust and effective strategy.

As a writer, I don’t understand the push to use artificial intelligence to craft creative content. Finding the right word and developing the perfect sentence can be a thrilling, aggravating and downright painful process. Don’t take that away from us!