INSIGHTS + GUIDANCE ON
THOUGHT-LEADERSHIP PR FOR LAW FIRMS
As our careers mature, business development becomes crucial to advancement opportunities. So, we might not like to “sell,” but we’d better be active relationship builders, if nothing else. You might not want to cold call a prospect, or send an unsolicited invitation to lunch, or attend a networking event. But you might not have to. And this is where content comes in.
There’s little to stop you, except your own limiting beliefs about what’s possible. Heading into 2020, with a bit of experience under your belt, you can take steps to accelerate your path along the profession’s learning curve. The following article focuses on the steps to get off to a fast start in your legal career.
If there is one trend we see coming to the fore in 2020 and beyond with respect to professional services marketing, it’s the rise of podcasting as a content marketing medium for lawyers, accountants and other consultants. And it’s not just because it’s novel, or fun, or self-flattering. It’s because there is a business case to be made for business-to-business podcasting. The sooner you embrace it, the sooner you will take a leading position in the marketplace of ideas.
If you want to engage your audience online, you can’t passively sit by and wait for prospects to stumble on your website bio. You need to funnel people in the right direction. You need to be visible, from Google to social media to relevant niche platforms, in places where your audience is searching for answers.
In the moment, it’s easy to fixate only on your struggles and failures if you never look back at how far you’ve come. If you take the time to look back, you’ll realize that the good things didn’t happen despite the bad ones; they happened because of them. Put another way, the only way to succeed is to fail.
PowerPoint presentations present unique challenges for lawyers, professional services firms, and marketing departments across industries. They can be time-consuming to create, difficult to present, and, too often, lacking in the power of persuasion. We address the most common problems we see when it comes to developing impactful presentations and pitches.
Too often attorneys allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good, and get so hung up on perfecting the content they write that they run the risk of interminably delaying release of their work to the point that it never sees light of day. Or worse, they get so hung up on trying to conceive of the perfect topic, they fail to put pen to paper at all. We call this content paralysis.
While I believe that everyone is capable of building a profitable roster of clients, there are many lawyers who are beginning their careers at law firms who will, down the road, decide on a different path. Even for those lawyers, it’s a good idea to begin laying the foundation for business development, because the skills required to position oneself for business development success are valuable and transferable to almost any domain in life.
We are excited to announce the launch of The Thought Leadership Project podcast, a program dedicated to helping lawyers turn their expertise into thought leadership, and their thought leadership into new business. Our podcast allows us to take a deep dive into a wide range of thought leadership-related issues, from the importance of establishing a niche focus for your content to how to establish yourself as a thought leader on LinkedIn.
