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| Kim McLaughlin |
If I had a dollar for every lawyer who said, “Kim, I don’t need a big digital marketing program,” I would own an island.
And the good news is that I agree. Outside of the competitive field of personal injury, very few professional service firms need large digital marketing programs, but that doesn’t mean they should avoid digital marketing altogether.
There is a middle ground, and there are a few ways to ensure that the digital program a company embraces is the exact size it needs to be to get the job done.
Start with strategy
If you’ve read my columns before, you know that I’m a stickler for strategy. A strategy defines the firm’s goal and objectives and sets out a roadmap to get there. A strategy mitigates the risk of wasting resources on activities that are unaligned or bound to fail, while fully leveraging aligned activities to increase the return on investment.
Think of it like this: A lawyer would never go to trial without a carefully constructed trial strategy, and marketing requires the same attention. My recommendation is to earmark the first 5-10 per cent of your marketing budget for strategy, rather than wasting 100 per cent of your budget on nonsensical activities.
Context over content
Seven years ago, content was king. The more the better, and companies became expert at churning out a steady stream of content to feed the beast called digital marketing. It was exhausting, and I’m so glad it’s over.
Today’s audiences are far too savvy to be impressed by quantity, and instead look to quality. Quality is always defined by the value a piece of content like a blog or a LinkedIn post provides to a prospect, and what is valuable to them is driven by context.
For example, the client-lawyer relationship is one of trust. A prospect must trust their lawyer before choosing to retain them. How can we build that trust?
Rather than writing a slew of blog posts of questionable quality because your search engine optimization manager says you need to, how about brainstorming topics of real value to your prospects and writing two longer, high-quality posts? Then, when you know your prospect is evaluating whether or not your firm deserves their trust, you can make a point of sending them a link to a blog post that could help them. It’s thoughtful, appreciated and bound to land you the client. It’s also a heck of a lot easier than writing six blog posts a month.
And by the way, lest we ignore the pleas of your long-suffering SEO manager, Google will better reward two long-format, high-quality blog posts than six shorter posts on cutesy topics, so it’s good for the client, good for Google and good for you.
Build on what already works
I found it astounding that the staff of digital agencies often think that a law firm can replace building real-world relationships with Google AdWords.
When I ask a lawyer how they get their business, 99 per cent of the time they say “referrals.” Even younger lawyers, those digital natives we envy, get a vast majority of their files through referrals.
A streamlined digital program likely won’t seek to replace the referral network, but will enhance it with tactics like LinkedIn outreach, organized networking and perhaps public speaking. These are all tactics that empower the professional to be in front of a large number of people at one time, either online or in the real world, with the intent of building even more real-world relationships.
Returning to the original question of size, whether or not a firm requires a big program is going to be driven by the initial strategy, context and what’s already proven to work. Once these aspects are taken into consideration, only then can we determine if a firm needs a “big” program, or if a smaller one will do.
Kim McLaughlin is a digital strategist with Lyra Digital Services who specializes in LinkedIn for Lawyers. She combines experience from the political arena and professional service firms to help companies win business on the web.
Interested in writing for us? To learn more about how you can add your voice to The Lawyer’s Daily, contact Analysis Editor Richard Skinulis at Richard.Skinulis@lexisnexis.ca or call 437-828-6772.