Join Jocelyn Brumbaugh for the inaugural Brand Building in 15 Minutes program on Tuesday, April 13, 2021 at 11:00 a.m. CT/12:00 p.m. ET when she will lead an actionable discussion on how law firms can jump-start their marketing and business development efforts. 

Attendees will come away with best practices on:

• Actions firms can take to raise their profile
• A guide for building a marketing infrastructure for sustainable client and prospect touchpoints 
• Best practices for building internal excitement for marketing

Enjoy insights and best practices for law firm marketing?  Sign up for our newsletter here.

Watch the full presentation here:

 

Video Transcription

Jocelyn Brumbaugh (00:03):
Hi everybody, thanks for joining us. I am Jocelyn Brumbaugh and I am the founder of Builden Partners. Thank you for joining us for the inaugural program Brand Building in 15 minutes. This series is for us to give some tips and tricks to lawyers, law firm marketers and administrators on how to raise their profile. Today we’re going to talk about five steps to raising your firm’s profile. And real quick about us, we are Builden Partners. We do marketing strategy specifically for law firms. The senior team and I, we all grew up in large law firms, so we do a lot of project work for the AM Law 100 firms. But, my favorite part about what we do is serving as an outsourced marketing department for firms, typically with about 20 to a hundred attorneys. When firms are of that size, they fit in with our model really well.

(01:00):
And we’ll talk a little bit about the model today, these five steps, but they don’t have so many people that they need their own marketing army like we had back in my Baker and Mckenzie days. So here are the five steps. These are the five steps to raising your firm’s profile—and I need to stop right there and say these are not five tips. These are not things that you can do randomly, as lawyers or sometimes want to handle their marketing. These are five things that you need to do in this order and consistently in order to raise your profile. And we’ll go into the details of each of these over the next couple of minutes. So the first part is about mining for what your firm is already doing well. Where I think that Builden differentiates itself from other consultants in our space is that we say that you don’t have to write more, or speak more or sell more in order to raise your profile. You just need to fully leverage the things that you’re already doing.

(01:57):
So what are the things that you’re already doing that you might not be fully leveraging? So things like the industry updates that you push out, the case law updates, those sorts of things. People that you bring in, your new hires, your partner promotions, recent wins, either ones that are cloaked—so you don’t quite say, you just talk about the industry and the amazing thing that you did or with client approval. Things where you’re involved in the community, board appointments, those sorts of things. And also speaking engagements and webinars. These are the things that your attorneys are already doing that you’re probably not fully leveraging. And one of the ways that you can fully leverage it is to position it as thought leadership and not as administrative. This is that circle over there on the right, and here’s what that means. So let’s say that I’m giving a presentation to the Chicago Bar Association and I make the headline, “Jocelyn Brumbaugh Speaks to the Chicago Bar Association.”

(02:50):
So there’s one person who’s going to click on that content, and that’s my mom. Because she’s the only person in the whole wide world who cares that Jocelyn spoke somewhere. But, if I change the headline to say, “Jocelyn Brubach Shares Insights on How Covid is Affecting High-Value Settlements,” that’s a headline, right? That’s a headline that many people are going to be interested in. And it’s the same speech. It’s the same speech that I agreed to really far in advance, I didn’t think the deck was going to take that long, right? We’ve all been there, but we’re positioning it and pushing the thought leadership out in front instead of making it administrative. And that’s going to come back a couple of times throughout the steps as we move through them. But that’s the most important thing, capturing all the news and capturing it well. All right, so that’s step one.

(03:39):
So step two is putting the news on your website, and there’s a couple of things that you need to keep in mind. The most important thing is that you’re not done. A lot of firms that we talked to, they say “News is on the website, we marketed!” So the subsequent steps three, four and five are going to show you how to get your content in front of people, where they are, not just on your website. But this is the building block, right? That’s why it’s only step two. You need to get that news on your website. You need to get your headlines on the homepage because there’s three places that visitors to law firm websites go. They go to the homepage, they go to attorney bios, and they go to the “Contact Us” page to get your phone number. So those are the most visited pages.

(04:20):
So put your news there. Make sure that you’re fully leveraging every eyeball that gets to your website. You also want to make sure that you have a detailed page with the full story on a separate page. So for a lot of law firm websites, it’s that blog feature where you have that little bit of an excerpt. It’s really important not just to have one long scroll of all your news. As we move through the other steps, we’ll be driving people back to the website and they need to go to just that piece of content that they’re looking for, not the most recent content that you may have posted since then. So be sure to dynamically tag the content to the attorney pages, that’s really important. And it’s easier to get that set up on the backend so your content automatically populates on your attorney bios, rather than you having to go in and linking every new piece of content, to get that set up in the coding on the backend goes a really long way.

(05:12):
Okay. So that’s step two, step three. So now you need to take that news and start putting it where people are. And the first step to that is creating a firm LinkedIn page. This is the company page that your law firm is going to have. So you need that piece first, and then you need to take this content and put it within your feed. It’s really easy—you click the start a post, you add a headline, you grab that URL, right? That’s why we were talking about in step two, why you can’t have that really long scroll. You grab the URL from just that piece of content and you upload it. And then, you need to get a correctly sized photo or some other kind of image to attach to this story. We have been trained through social media. We don’t care about text anymore.

(05:59):
We all look for the images. You have to have a great image. And as humans, we’re all drawn to faces. So the best possible image that you can have are the faces of the attorneys who are sharing this thought leadership, or have this speaking engagement coming up, or are handling this webinar. The faces are what you want within that post, and it’s really important to get them sized correctly. You have definitely looked through your LinkedIn feed and seen someone’s eyebrows and felt really bad for them, and it’s not really their fault. It’s LinkedIn’s fault, because LinkedIn images are all horizontal and we are all vertical. Despite any weight that you’ve gained over covid, you are still basically a vertical creature. So it’s really important to have a correctly sized photo or image within the post. That’s what’s going to drive eyeballs. So, right now we’ve got the content, steps one through two and three.

(06:48):
We’ve got your content onto the firm LinkedIn page. But again, someone has to really try to get to that content. The next couple of steps are where we push that content out into people’s feeds and into their inboxes. So step four is circulating the LinkedIn post internally. And this, I call this the money step. There are so many benefits of this step and it’s really important, and so many law firms skip this step. They’ll say, “We have some content, we put it on our website, we sent out a newsletter, we marketed.” This is the money step, and let me tell you why. So taking that LinkedIn content and circulating it internally, for example, that we use “Jocelyn spoke recently at the CBA go like or share or comment as you see fit.” The basic thing that that’s going to do is drive engagement, right?

 

(07:40):
It’s going to take the content from your firm LinkedIn page and get it into the connections of your feed. And if this was the only thing that circulating the post did, if this was the only benefit, that would be enough, because you’ve got thousands or maybe tens of thousands of collective connections when you combine everyone within the firm and all of their LinkedIn connections. Get your content in front of those eyeballs. But doing the step does so much more. One of the things- one of the other benefits that is particular to Covid is it serves as that glue, that internal communications glue. So if you send something about a litigation win, the corporate folks didn’t know that was happening at a lot of firms. We don’t have that water cooler, especially right now when we’re at home. So to know what the different aspects of your firm, the different lawyers, the different practices, what they’re working on and the successes that they’re seeing, that leads to this cross-selling that we’re all trying to make happen, just by sending that around internally.

(08:39):
The other thing it does is it helps with retention of your associates and your junior partners. So what do those folks want? They want to work somewhere that they’re proud of, and they want to work somewhere where the lawyers are winning, and they’re involved in the community, and they give insights into what’s going on in the profession. And your lawyers do that, you just never tell the associates. So sending this around gives them something to be proud of. All of their colleagues from law school, all of their former classmates are touting the cool things that their firms are doing. Give your associates something to talk about, about the cool things that are happening at their firm. They want to do this, right? They want to spend a lot of time on social media, we know they do. Give them something great to start talking about.

(09:29):
And if those are the only benefits, right? That’s a lot so far, but I haven’t even gotten to the best one. The best part about sending something around internally is that it makes the lawyers mad. And here’s what I mean. So you send around the thing, “Congratulations to Jocelyn. She spoke last week at the CBA like, comment, share as you see fit.” So Fred is going to say, “Jocelyn? she’s an idiot. Why are you talking about what she did? Last week I wrote this thing for the ISBA. How come nobody’s sending around this thing?” And we can, but Fred wouldn’t have told you about it if you knocked on his door and said, “Hey, what are you doing? We’re trying to market, Fred. What are you doing that we could talk about?” He wouldn’t have given you anything, but if he thinks that Jocelyn’s getting something that he’s not, he’s in, right?

(10:11):
So every time you take this content and you send it around internally, it does that. It puts that bug in someone’s brain, “Oh right, I’m doing this thing. How can I get into this process so you can start help promoting my content within this?” So, so many good things come from this measly step four. And the great news is that LinkedIn makes it really easy for you to track your analytics. You can go in there and you can see who’s sharing and who’s liking. You can take to management, “Hey, look, we’re not even doing anything more. We’re not taking any more attorney time, but look at how many more eyeballs are getting in front of this content.” Alright, so that’s step four. So step five is distributing a curated newsletter. And there’s a couple of things to keep in mind with this, when we push this content through LinkedIn, and the other social media channels that may be important to your firm, you’re getting a lot of people, but you’re not getting everyone right?

(11:08):
You’re not getting all the friends, and clients, and prospects that are on your firm list. So take that same content and push it out again in a curated way. And that means not everything, not every piece of news that you have, not all 15 things. It needs to be thoughtful, some wins, some new hires, a diverse collection of people that we’re promoting. That’s when it’s time to have a curated newsletter. And you don’t want to blow your wad. You don’t want to put all the content in the newsletter. You want it to be excerpts, a couple of headlines drive people to the website where they can go and poke around and learn more about your firm and the things that you do. You don’t want it to be all text either. No one’s going to look at that, right? We talked about that in an earlier step.

(11:51):
You want to take those same images that you created for social, that’s got faces in them or interesting content, and put that to break up some of the text of your newsletter. And then the subject line, please never have a newsletter with a subject line that says “Spring 2021.” None of your clients are relying on you to find out when the seasons are changing, this is not a reason. It’s not even a reason that it’s a new quarter to send out a newsletter. It’s a reason to send out a newsletter when you have a curated list of stories, a little bit for everybody, that you can send out. Another terrible headline is “Whatever your newsletter name is, number 73.” And why is that? It’s because it’s administrative, right? We talked about that on slide one. That’s burying the thought leadership content. Instead, take the best news item.

(12:41):
What’s the really good one? The one that made you say, “We’ve got to get this in front of our clients and prospects.” That piece of content, that headline, that’s your subject line. And again, you want to track your analytics, right? Whether you’re using MailChimp, or Constant Contact, or Active Campaign or whatever it is that you’re using, each one of your newsletters needs to be better than the last one. Because you can go see, “Gosh, we have seven stories in here, no one’s reading five through seven.” We don’t do that anymore. We have them be more frequent. We find out based on when we send it out, when people are opening this, how many people are opening it, what kind of stories are they clicking through. That you need to make sure that every one of your newsletters is better than the last. Alright, so those were the five steps. You mine for what the firm is already doing well.

(13:26):
You take that content and you put the news on the website. You share it on social media. You circulate it internally. And then you get that curated newsletter. So that was 15 minutes. That went by really fast. There are a lot of other things that you can do to fully maximize your content, and I’m happy to chat with anybody who wants to reach out and talk about them. Really appreciate you sticking around for the first ever Brand Building in 15 Minutes. Save the date for our next one, it will be on Tuesday, May 11th, same time 11:00 AM Central, noon Eastern. This will be 15 Minutes to a Stronger LinkedIn Profile. Know there’s lots of other things to tell you, but you got to get back to your day job. So if you have other questions, feel free to reach out to me. Also, feel free to drop a note to hello@buildenpartners.com and you can sign up for our newsletter. Alright everyone, thank you so much, and have a great day.