In case you missed the first two parts of the series, you can read them here. The first part of the series identified 3 positive marketing actions you can take to jumpstart your marketing in 2017. The second focused on evaluating your website and some solid things to consider when you move forward with an update.
This part of the series focuses on maximizing your communication outreach and supporting you to be conclusive in your audience and consistently, consistent.
This post is my no means meant to be the “be all, end all” guide, but a start for some and a reminder for others of what you need to be doing.
For those of you that are pros at content creation, management and delivery, please comment and throw out additional ideas that could benefit your brethren.
First of all, you need an audience. Remember, the greatest performers didn’t fill the stadium on day one, so start with what you have and grow from there. Be conclusive, pull all your lists together:
- Email contacts;
- Holiday lists
- Client contacts
- Alumni contacts
- Purchased lists
- Whatever you have…
Wherever possible, track the source of the contact and contact type (i.e. Met at ABA event, referral source.) Lots of ways to track and capture this information, but the easiest is in a database or spreadsheet tool that you can sort by column and easily add and update information.
If you need help, call us. This is a big part of what we do to support firms in their communications. Getting them set up initially and maintaining the data as a monthly service, keeping it clean and current.
This time of year is perfect to start as many of you just pulled your contacts together for a holiday distribution.
Develop your Rhythm: If you took the first post in the series seriously, you have an indication of your potential writing “output”. If you did not, you need to go back and read the section Brainstorm thought leadership/article topics:
Go ahead, we will wait for you…
So you have your list of ideas. if you have a team, you have articles assigned and you have your dates set, now you just need to get busy writing… Easier said than done right!
Back to the Rhythm thing… We strongly recommend you not commit to a monthly newsletter off the bat. Too much pressure. Start quarterly, or bi-annually. Get some success under your belt with initial blog type topical articles before tackling publishing anything on a regular cycle.
Some quick tips for developing solid blog habits:
- Start small in your articles if you have to. All you need is a few paragraphs commenting on a topical area with links to the topic.
- Don’t worry about writer’s block, everybody gets it. Just power through with brainstorming. Review what others are doing.
- BIG TIP: readers are interested in things outside of the law, never forget that.
- Bigger tip: However, they likely are not interested in your kid’s soccer team… Unless of course you are dogging on how the parents are acting, that’s a whole nuther animal…
- Curate topical content. Obviously, not plagiarizing other’s work, but providing your commentary on topics your audience will find interesting.
- Try to write something, at a minimum, on a monthly basis. Guess what… over time you will have developed enough personal content to re-publish in a newsletter. If more than one of your team is producing content, you can be selective in what you reproduce. Suddenly you have a bunch of content.
- Oh and by the way… You don’t have to be an attorney to write well, be conclusive in the team members proving ideas for and writing content.
- ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS get a second opinion on potentially controversial topics. Unless you practice mandates, just don’t do it!
- Reminder: THIS IS IPORTANT TO YOUR BUSINESS.
- Distribute everything… Post on Social Media… Update your website links
- Go buy a few small notebooks. Put them at your desk, in the car, in your office, on your nightstand, in the bathroom… You never know when inspiration will strike.
- Jot down your ideas in long form, making sure you can remember the details later. From personal experience, I will sometimes go back to notes and not have a clue because they are too cryptic. So not a shopping list, but an outline wherever possible.
- Set aside time to think and write. Better yet, SCHEDULE IT!
- Be consistent. If you have to, assign someone to be your personal pain in the you-know-what to keep you focused, or hire us to do it. Everyone needs help in some form or another, make sure you set yourself up with right support system to succeed.
- If life gets in the way and you go “out-of-rhythm”, what’s that saying? “stuff happens”. Don’t let a lapse get in the way of building your business.
- Success in this endeavor comes in many different ways, and is typically not immediate. Stay the course.
- Most importantly, have fun with it. Hopefully you will find this practice thought provoking intellectually stimulating and invigorating.
We would love to help you and your team develop the systems and processes to successfully grow your business. We know from experience, there is no one size fits all approach to developing a successful and sustainable business model. So, feel free to reach out to us to kick around ideas and determine if our team could add value to you in your pursuit.
It’s Why We Are Here! We look forward to helping you in any way we can.
The ProfessionalWORX Team