Content is king. Any legal marketer has heard this tagline (ad nauseam) in recent years. Most of us have read that creating a content marketing strategy will revitalize a tired law firm marketing campaign, but are daunted by the time, effort and cost it would take to implement such a plan. Brand journalism takes it a step further—almost arriving at the intersection between traditional journalism and advertising. Creating custom content that speaks to your current and potential clients in a way that content which was created for all audiences to read and understand wouldn’t stand up to, and leveraging social media outlets to allow your brand to directly interact with its target audience. More specifically, according to Jaffe PR, “Legal Brand Journalism™ is a communications model that relies on a combination of traditional and innovative marketing tactics, technological savvy and, most importantly, a journalist’s high standard for quality content. It is the next evolution in integrated marketing; a buzz term that, simply put, means conveying a singular brand identity across multiple marketing channels.”
Having a cache of content that can be easily repurposed, posted and spread amongst multiple content channels (website, blogs, social media, etc.) is every legal marketer’s dream, but only if that content is targeted for the audience of each channel. Creating poorly crafted press releases which only tout the firm’s successes may seem like an easy way to cull a multitude of content, but if there is no reason for an audience to want to read it—what is the point of creating it? Anyone who took a journalism course at some point during their education learned the five W’s that are pertinent to a news story, and they can be used to create a brand journalism strategy for your law firm just as they can be used to create a news story for a traditional media source.
Who? This question is dual-faceted in brand journalism; you must not only consider who you are writing about when deciding on the tone of the piece, but also who will be reading this content. Attorneys tend to write for other attorneys, which may be the target audience in many cases; but if your content should be targeted for non-attorney clients in a specific industry, make sure the content is crafted in a tone that they will not only understand, but relate to. In traditional corporate efforts in brand journalism, the brand spokesperson may speak directly to clients and potential clients through Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, for example; they may choose to address complaints and/or questions about their product. In attempting to translate this to the legal arena, we may run into some issues and are not entirely comfortable with this interactive medium on that level. However, some attorneys may embrace the real-time interaction with their clients, and see this as positioning themselves as thought leaders in their industry while sitting at their desk or using their smartphone. It’s all a matter of firm culture and attorney personality.
What? In journalism, we often hear the term “voice” when describing the tone of an article. The firm’s brand must come across in the “voice” of your content, in order to keep continuity over multiple channels. However, you can tailor the tone to fit different media outlets and get more mileage out of one piece of content. The lead (or introductory paragraph) on a client alert sent to a specific facet of your client base may be different than the 140-character teaser on a Tweet that repurposes the exact same white paper. Make sure you engage metrics that best measure the ROI on your content strategy so that you focus your time and effort in the right places.
When? Timely topics beget a race to get the news out first, before your competitors break the story and you fall in line with the rest of the world who was too late to the party. Newspapers are constantly fighting to break stories first and be the bearers of good or bad news. The race is not everything—sometimes providing content that is relevant to a time of year (i.e., a quick client alert from the tax group around March Madness about the tax ramifications of NCAA pool winnings) can grab a potential client’s attention when it would have gone unnoticed at another time of the year. Tying content into socially relevant topics makes your content more easily found, and can be repurposed around the same time in years to come. The good thing about this “W” is that if there isn’t a matter of exigency at hand in a piece of content, it can be written and stored in a virtual time capsule; keep the content for a time when everyone appears too busy to write something, and pull it out then. It is better to have extra content on hand that can be utilized in a pinch than to put off writing it because it wasn’t the right time.
Where? Writing a targeted, geographically-relevant piece can be challenging if your firm has a national practice, but it can be beneficial in many ways. The easiest to recognize is that your SEO is automatically heightened by utilizing locations, and in any online presence this will help a target audience member find and connect with your firm if they feel that they truly understand their issue. Knowing the locale and the community a client lives and works in may be the difference between the client picking your firm or a firm that is recognized for being the go-to in that area. Alternately, using a descriptive locale in an attorney’s bio or in a blog post may help the reader connect with the story if it is a place or type of place that they relate to. Using location as a storytelling technique can make a huge difference in connecting with your audience.
Why? This is the most important question of all—why would your target audience want to read your content? Are you simply touting internal successes without explaining how they add value to your practice? In exploring social media interactions directly with clients, we face the challenges of “giving away” legal services and controlling the voices of many attorneys who may not be fit for that venue, and therefore the law firm arena may not be where traditional corporate entities are in this fashion. However, the step in the right direction in implementing a brand journalistic approach to marketing is to always keep the “why” in the forefront.
Legal Brand Journalism allows us to hone our content creation skills, and utilize the most current technological advances to broadcast to a target audience with little effort. A little time spent strategizing how this can help your firm, as well as having that strategic document on hand to ensure that you are following the firm’s plan in any efforts the marketing department makes, can help you stand out from the crowd in today’s marketplace.
By Jenna O’Connor, Director of Marketing for Rosenberg Martin Greenberg, LLP (Baltimore, MD) for the September/October 2013 Newsletter.