10 Resolutions to Elevate Your Personal Brand in the New Year

Personal branding has become more than just a buzzword – it’s a crucial element of career success. As we embark on a new year, it’s essential to recognize the power of a well-crafted personal brand. It’s not just about making a mark in your industry; it’s about creating a distinct identity that resonates with your professional ethos and vision.

Every individual inherently has a personal brand. It’s an amalgamation of your skills, experiences and the impressions you leave on others.

Even without conscious effort, your interactions, online presence and professional accomplishments contribute to how you are perceived. This unintentional brand can impact your career and opportunities positively or negatively. Actively shaping your personal brand allows you to control this narrative, ensuring it aligns with your career goals and reflects your professional identity. Neglecting it means letting others define it for you, which might not always match your aspirations or values.

Building your personal brand can feel overwhelming, but with a strategic and thoughtful approach, this process can unlock doors to new opportunities and personal growth, allowing you to shape and share your unique professional story with the world.

This blog post will guide you through easy and effective strategies to build and enhance your personal brand, which will help set you apart from your peers and competitors.

  1. Define Your Unique Brand: Delve deep to articulate your core strengths, values and the distinctive qualities that set you apart in your industry. Reflect on your career highlights and how they shape your professional narrative. For what do you want to be known? Be clear.
  2. Ensure Consistent Messaging: Audit all your professional platforms to ensure they convey a unified story about who you are and what you offer. This includes everything from your LinkedIn bio to your website/website bio.
  3. Be Active on Social Media: Plan a content calendar to regularly share insights, engage with industry conversations and connect with thought leaders. Being active also means responding to comments and messages to foster connections.
  4. Create and Share Valuable Content: Consider starting a blog or a podcast, or contribute as a guest writer to industry publications. Share your experiences, case studies or lessons learned to provide real value to your audience.
  5. Network Actively: Attend industry events, webinars and workshops. Be proactive in reaching out for informational interviews or mentorship opportunities.
  6. Commit to Personal Development: Identify key areas for growth and seek out resources like online courses, books, podcasts or coaching. Staying updated with the latest industry trends is also crucial.
  7. Seek and Adapt to Feedback: Regularly seek feedback from peers, mentors or through professional assessments. Use this feedback to refine your brand and address any gaps.
  8. Maintain Professional Visual Branding: Invest in a professional headshot and ensure your visual branding (like color scheme, fonts, etc.) is professional and consistent across all platforms.
  9. Get Involved in Your Community: Align with causes or organizations that resonate with your personal values. Share these experiences on your platforms to show your commitment beyond work.
  10. Monitor Your Online Presence: Use free tools like Google Alerts to keep track of your digital footprint. Ensure that your online presence is positive and accurately reflects your personal brand.

To begin crafting your personal brand, start by reflecting on your unique skills, experiences and what differentiates you professionally. Set aside time each week to engage with your network, create content that showcases your expertise, and participate in relevant online discussions. Regularly update your professional profiles and assess the alignment of your online presence with your brand. This proactive and consistent effort will gradually build a strong, authentic personal brand.

These resolutions are more than just annual goals; they are commitments to ongoing personal and professional growth. Remember that visibility is each of our responsibility. By following these steps, you can significantly enhance your personal brand, making it a powerful tool in your career advancement.

How to Harness the Power of Email Marketing in Law Firm Business Development

In an era where email remains a dominant communication tool, with billions of users and even more emails sent daily, law firms of all sizes can harness the power of email marketing for business development.

The return on investment is significant – $42 for every $1 spent – but this success hinges on the quality and relevance of the content shared.

For your email marketing program to be successful, you must provide your audiences with thoughtfully curated, value-added content. This is particularly crucial for smaller to mid-sized firms that might not have the same resources or volume of content as larger firms. By focusing on niche segmentation, these firms can use content marketing to effectively compete with larger entities.

The integration of emarketing systems with your CRM is vital. These systems not only facilitate efficient distribution of content but also provide invaluable data on content performance and audience engagement. Such insights are pivotal for making informed business development decisions.

Some smaller and mid-sized firms are already excelling, using tools like JD Supra to distribute their content and gain media attention. This strategy has allowed them to grow their audience and stand toe-to-toe with larger firms.

For email content, law firms should focus on sharing information that showcases their expertise and aligns with their clients’ interests. This can include legal updates, insights into regulatory changes, case studies and thought leadership articles. Practical advice, tips and guidance on current legal issues relevant to their client base are also valuable.

In addition, firms can share firm news, such as notable case wins, new hires or community involvement, to personalize their communication and strengthen relationships with their audience. The content should be informative, engaging, and, most importantly, relevant to the recipients to ensure it resonates and fosters stronger connections.

The message is clear: with strategic content and email marketing, backed by robust CRM and emarketing systems, any law firm can make a significant impact in today’s competitive landscape.

Key Takeaways

  • High ROI on Email Marketing: For every dollar spent, there’s an average return of $42, making email marketing highly effective for business development.
  • Content is Crucial: The success of email marketing depends on providing relevant and valuable content to your audience.
  • Impactful for Smaller Firms: Smaller to mid-sized law firms can leverage content marketing to compete with larger firms by targeting niche segments.
  • Integration with CRM: Utilizing emarketing systems integrated with CRM enhances content distribution and provides valuable engagement data.
  • Data-Driven Decisions: Analytics from emarketing systems help in making informed business development strategies based on content performance and audience engagement.
  • Leveling the Playing Field: Smaller firms can grow their audience and compete effectively by distributing content through platforms like JD Supra and gaining media attention.

10 Content Marketing Best Practices to Implement Today

While many law firms are content producing powerhouses, pushing out alerts, social media posts and other information daily via the many distribution channels with which they engage their target audiences, they often fail to take the time to think about the how, what, when, where and why of the content they are creating and disseminating and how it will help/benefit their clients and other influential readers.

For example, do you ever feel as if you are a content machine who is just going through the content motions, following orders of those around you, because “that’s the way they’ve always done it,” or because you don’t want to question a partner or someone more senior to you?

If so, take a moment to give yourself a “content timeout” so you can really think about why you are doing what you are doing.

If it doesn’t make sense with your brand and business development goals, immediately change your course.

Taking the time to ensure that your content marketing strategy and your BD strategy are aligned will enable you to create more focused, strategic content that will better engage and resonate with your target audiences (more on this below).

Remember that the goal of content marketing is not just about populating your social media feeds with a steady stream of content.

Rather, the goal is to use content as a differentiator and a tool to help position you and your firm as a thought leader, which will help to keep you top of mind with key individuals.

Here are a few things you can do right away to take your content strategy to the next level to help you achieve these goals.

1 – Align your content strategy to your business development goals. I always say that every single person involved in legal marketing is a business development person regardless of your actual job title or function.

You must be focused on lead generation and business development in your position to really understand what the firm’s goals are, especially when it comes to content.

Aligning your content and social media strategy to your BD goals will enable you to choose the right practices and industries on which to focus.

You can then also use your analytics and competitive intelligence to help support your efforts (such as Google analytics, web site, social media and email stats, among others).

Remember, everything you do should be centered on bringing in business for the firm, including every single piece of content you create.

2 – Show vs. tell. Every piece of content you post should be value-added, helpful and client-centric. So, don’t just tell your clients why you are the best lawyers, show them. Think about how to demonstrate that you are a leader in your field versus telling someone.

Write  content with this concept in mind – from the highest-level thought leadership article to every social media post.

Think about “why should your clients care about this?” when crafting language.

Remember that most often, your clients are not lawyers, so throw the legalese and jargon out the window and put yourself in their shoes. Clients want to know who you are and how you can help them. It’s that simple.

3 – Reuse and repurpose everything. Think headshots, practice area images, previously published client alerts and articles.

Every image and piece of content you have can be used multiple times. For example, you can pull out an interesting statistic, create a word cloud, use icons or big numbers to bring important points to life, a quote or just tell the story in a different way, and voilà, it’s a different piece of content! Use an editorial calendar to help you track and manage the posts.

3 – Create once, publish everywhere (but adjust the message for the medium). Delving deeper into the point above, while you should leverage the social platforms most frequently used by your clients and prospects, don’t post the same exact content and image to LinkedIn that you would post to Twitter or Facebook or Instagram.

It’s very important that you demonstrate to your target audiences that you have mastery of the social media platforms that you are utilizing or else you are committing social media suicide. Incorrectly using a particular platform shows your audience that you lack critical social media skills.

Also, while it’s great if your firm has thousands of followers on LinkedIn and Twitter and the like, don’t forget that you also need to tap into the critical social networks of your lawyers to have maximum engagement.

Ensure that your lawyers are properly trained on how to effectively use LinkedIn to share and like content or else you will miss out on reaching their powerful networks!

4 – Use free online tools to gain a competitive edge. Working with mid-size firms with limited budgets, I often have to get resourceful. I use a lot of online free/low-cost tools to help me gain a competitive advantage over my peers.

Also, set up Google Alerts on your top clients and prospects. These are free and give you great insights into your clients. Arm yourself with as much information as you can and you will have an advantage over your competitors and demonstrate to your clients how much you care about their businesses.

4 – Use evergreen content to your advantage: Evergreen content is SEO-optimized content that doesn’t have an expiration date, or lose its relevancy and value over time. It is high-quality, helpful content that provides value whether it is read today, next week or a year from now.

So why is it called “evergreen?” The evergreen tree is a symbol of everlasting life because this type of tree keeps its leaves throughout the seasons, rather than shedding them. Like the trees, evergreen content is considered sustainable and lasting.

Creating an evergreen content strategy is easier than you think because you already have all of the content and most of the tools that you need. It just requires a little creative thinking on how to effectively repurpose them.

For example, content opportunities (and the visual assets that go along with them) such as lawyer bios, holidays, office openings, firm history, timeless client alerts, case studies on matters/practices, careers, professional development, pro bono and diversity, events, as well as information from transcripts can all be used to fill in content gaps in your editorial calendar.

5 – Incorporate visuals. Taking the point above a step further, I’m a firm believer that you should post nothing to social media without an image. Why? Because social media posts with images gain more views and engagement, period. Anyone can incorporate visuals into their social media strategy, you just need to be creative and resourceful.

You can easily reuse and repurpose images that you already have, and resize them using tools right on your smartphone. In addition, there are many photo and online design tools that enable you to create images for free or at a low cost such as canva.com and Picstitch that enable you to create visually arresting graphics to bring your social media posts to life.

For more low cost and even better – free! – tools that you can incorporate into your social media content strategy, take a look at my JD Supra article that explores 17 really cool martech tools that you should know about.

6 – Focus on the headlines. In order to stand out from the many emails that your in-house counsel receive each day and the countless social media posts they see clogging their feeds, you must create headlines and copy that will draw them in. We already talked about how to effectively use images in your posts, but we didn’t delve into headlines.

The subject lines/headlines of your emails (so client alerts, press releases, white papers, CLE programs and anything else that you send via email to clients/contacts) is the very first thing that they see and determines whether someones wants to open up your email – or not. So make them clear, actionable, short, succinct (and extra points if you can create a “how-to” or “why” piece or use numbers or a list format such as what I did with my title above). “Listcicles” are very popular ways of communicating complex information into digestible chunks.

  1. Network and share online: LinkedIn is the most important social media channel for law firm business development and professional networking. It enables you to quickly build and grow relationships so that you can bring in new business and referrals, build your brand and stay top of mind with key individuals in your professional network. So, use it smartly and use it often (meaning post and share value-added content, and engage meaningfully with your connections). I write a lot about how to maximize LinkedIn and use it effectively – see my latest JD Supra articles on LinkedIn profile basics and more advanced LinkedIn to-do’s – because I have never seen the platform directly lead to new business more than I have in the last year (hint – use the notifications section to give you reasons to be in touch with important contacts in your network – information is power here!).
  2. Think quality not quantity. I touched on this a bit above, but since it’s such an important point, I wanted to dedicate a bullet to it. The ultimate goal of content marketing is to drive readers to take action, preferably in the form of contacting and retaining your firm. So it’s not how often you post content to social media that makes a true impact, but rather what you say and how you say it. The quality not the quantity of your posts should always be your primary focus, and keeping that concept at the forefront of your content strategy will help to guide your overall efforts.

For all firms and lawyers, the goal of content marketing is lead generation and business development. How you get there is by building targeted relationships, staying top of mind, providing helpful content and consistently adding value.

Traditional Law Firm Professional Development Models Obsolete?

Brooks, Pierce, McLendon, Humphrey & Leonard, LLP, Law Firm, North Carolina

Most firm’s lawyer staffing model is not far removed from what might be called “traditional” or “old fashioned.” That means that they still hire most new lawyers immediately upon their graduation from law school, or judicial clerkships – and assume that when they join, they are not ready to practice law. We lawyers assume our new lawyers will learn by working with experienced lawyers (what the consultants call the “apprenticeship” model).

Depending on many variables, we assume that it takes four to seven years before most new lawyers become “stand-alone” professionals. We assume that in time our associates will become our partners and spend their careers as members of our firm. This model helps us to deliver a standard of client service that, we hope, sets us apart.

Are we obsolete? In a changing world, we hold to the conviction that our way remains the best: the best professional development model for lawyers who will become counsellors and advocates for clients facing the most difficult problems.

The greatest challenge to our model has come from high turnover among associates, which we attribute to demographics. Turnover among young lawyers at law firms generally is high, as apparently turnover is high for Millenials generally.

We believe that turnover at Brooks Pierce is lower than among our peers, but – at our size and in our practice niches – turnover (or, retention) is still a challenge, and it is expensive. We cannot ignore it.

Whaddaya gonna do?

We manage. Specifics (our not-so secrets) will come in posts to follow this one.

We believe that we have have continued to make the economics of the old model succeed, even in a time of high associate salaries – and on terms that are fair to our clients, yet work for us. That part is a story for another day.