Throw away everything you’ve been told about Social Media Marketing for Lawyers.
The legal marketing industry is (probably) wrong, or at best misguided – driven by vanity metrics that have little, if anything to do with generating consultations from prospective clients.
Mockingbird’s Social Media Marketing strategy builds genuine, deep, lasting, positive awareness in the local market of both the firm and the lawyers in it. We achieve this through deep, sustained involvement in your local community – showcasing individuals and businesses, supporting widely loved causes and building relationships with key individuals. We work with firms to systematically generate new localized (and non-legal) content and leverage the reach of social networks to transform your entire local market into one larger referral source. Its a flywheel that takes time, effort and creativity to get spinning, but one that creates a sustained competitive advantage.
Conceptually, this strategy is easy to understand. Tactically, execution is very difficult; the web is littered with abandoned law firm social media campaigns inspired by sales pitches at Legal Marketing conferences. The keys to Social Media success:
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- Figurehead Engagement – law firms brands are built on people. Social Media success requires a large time commitment from the firm figurehead; otherwise it comes across as confusing (at best) but more likely, disingenuous. You simply can’t have “Jeff the Social Media Intern” generate genuine community involvement for a law firm. Expect your most expensive and important asset to dedicate a significant amount of his/her time every single month. One additional consideration – success is highly dependent on that individual, with articulate, passionate, genuine, extroverted, “connectors” showing the most success. It helps if this individual has a personal cause, a local connection and a genuine love of helping others.
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- Systematic – We generate creative, localized content a minimum of twice a month on a strict schedule that requires heavy involvement from the above mentioned Figurehead.
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- Content Repurposing, Reformatting and Distribution – We repurpose social content for various platforms – a 20 minute interview is transformed as a podcast, repurposed on your YouTube channel, cut into 90 second Facebook clips, reformatted for LinkedIn etc.
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- Long Term/Patience – Building the social capital flywheel takes a minimum of 12 months to start spinning. There are no test drives. Jump in the deep end or don’t bother at all.
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- Measurement – measuring the referral impact of a successful localized social media campaign is extremely difficult. Traditional, trackable marketing channel attribution infrastructure tied to your firm’s Intake Management Software that so effectively capture linear direct response PPC and SEO performance simply don’t work. Be prepared to ask prospects who referred them to you and dig deep into their answers.
For more on the difficulties of accurately quantifying the value of Social, read the post on Dark Social in the Legal Marketing Industry.