In the highly competitive legal market, potential clients have many options for most types of legal work. In some instances, attorney brand advocacy can be the difference between landing a client or not.
But, you probably already know this; as a legal marketer, expanding your digital imprint has been steadily climbing up your priorities list. However, getting your attorneys on board is the real challenge.
Communicate the Brand
First and foremost, you must communicate the firm’s brand to your attorneys.
In Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, released in 2013, only 41 percent of employees could explain what their company stood for and what differentiated it from the competition.
This means that if your firm reflects the average company and you unleash 100 employees to spread your brand online, as many as 59 may be spreading the wrong message.
A branding (or rebranding) process can bring out the varying and perhaps off-message views within a firm. So can internal surveys and informal conversations. The important thing is to get everyone on the same page. Once you have communicated the brand to your attorneys and they have bought in, they will be more likely to become advocates.
Trust is (Very) Important
The key to being a brand advocate is capitalizing on established trust. But how important is trust? When talking to your data-driven, detail-oriented attorneys, just show them the numbers:
- In 2016, 55 percent of the general population trusted information created by employees of a company, according to the 2016 Edelman Trust Barometer. This represents a 9 percentage point increase over 2015.
- The only social media content people trusted more came from companies that consumers were already using, an academic expert, or friends and family, according to Edelman. This strongly supports the case for attorney advocacy because social media connects colleagues whose online sharing can become valuable marketing tools.
- Social media is appealing to Millennials (and everybody wants to appeal to Millennials). According to Edelman, Millennials trust social media 7 percent more than the general population.
When a press release or print ad goes out, it comes from “the media.” When a lawyer posts a helpful article on social media, that content comes from a trusted source, which means connections will share it with their connections. A few of these high impact connections might easily have greater return than a print ad reaching 10,000 subscribers.
Leveraging Existing Relationships
A blog from Cisco cites that employees’ social posts generate eight times “more engagement than posts from their employer.” It also states that the average employee has 10 times more social followers than the company.
As someone with experience in email marketing, I would always rather send 50 emails to people I know will buy a service than 400 emails to random people who might not. An eight-fold bump in engagement is worth the effort to promote on social media.
Time for Action
Armed with this data, it is time to take steps to activate your brand ambassadors.
- Approach the attorneys who are most active on social media. They will likely be more willing to carry the torch in the early going (and have bigger social media followings to capitalize on).
- Make it clear that the marketing team will do its part to post content, but that the most effective posts will come from the attorney.
- Review with your attorney advocates what constitutes appropriate content and any publishing guidelines you have established as a firm.
- Create a cheat sheet for attorneys to follow when posting to social media. Even better, make it bright, include images, make it easy to follow, and printable (yes, use paper to push electronic action).
By Scott Pacheco, Communications Specialist, Lerch, Early & Brewer, Chtd., for the September/October 2016 issue of Capital Ideas.