Job number-on in the legal sector has been to adopt a new business model. A step in that direction has been for Pepper Hamilton to appoint a nonlawyer Scott Green as its Chief Executive Officer. The next logical and needed step is to overhaul marketing from a sales model to what's being called "content marketing." Essentially, as MASHABLE explains, that's when B2B reaches out to share information, not promote itself. Of course, since law firms deal with complex issues, this is how they could shine.
The ideal way to do that is through online video. Show, don't tell. Yet, just yesterday, I received in snail mail a 2-page writeup from a Texas law firm detailing its wins for 2011. Of course, I tossed it. Why invest time in following a law firm from which I can learn nothing, be it a legal fundamental or how to market.
Marketing experts see organizations putting themselves out there as "houses of content." Everything will be framed as data to share, not self-promoting. The best of those houses of content will be operating out of their own online newsrooms. In them will be available what the media, public, prospects, clients, regulatory bodies, and more need to find out. For example, there will be backgrounders, packaged in compelling ways, on the legal history of birth control in the U.S., if the law firm has a practice related to those issues. Another set of backgrounders could be on grassroots or bottom-up lobbying. That would assist their clients in messaging.
Soon enough we will see help-wanted placed by law firms for a "Chief Content Officer," not a "Chief Marketing Officer."
Well if that's the case, then I'm appointing myself as "Chief Content Officer" now! Content really is king in all websites and blogs. We cannot do without writers who create timely and useful prose for everyone. I also agree about videos being bumped up to online marketing royalty status as well. What about mobile marketing though? Does it still have a place today?
Posted by: Ann Jelly Ong | February 14, 2012 at 02:20 AM