Inbound Marketing
Attorneys: How Content Marketing Can Take Your Career to the Next Level
The following post originally appeared in The Legal Intelligencer Blog.
As a marketer to the professional services industry, I can tell you that "content marketing" for law firms has arrived and is here to stay. With social media, email, and Web advancements, it's become all too easy to "push" your firm's message out to the masses. The result is a fundamental shift away from pushing the more self-serving “me” marketing messages out to the marketplace, towards providing “you”-focused content of value to a more targeted audience. Basically, your potential clients don't necessarily want to know about you or your firm; they have questions they want answered. The primary objective of content marketing is to gain the trust and attention of an audience by providing them with valuable information on topics they are already interested in.
Take a few moments to browse through large or mid-sized law firms’ web sites and notice how many offer blog sites and other tools and resources. Content marketing has become such an integral part of the marketing mix for professional services firms that it's become more of a "price to play" than a "nice to have." It's also a great opportunity for young attorneys and professionals to enhance their knowledge and boost their careers. If you and/or your firm don’t generate great content, you should consider starting!
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4 Ways Inbound and Outbound Marketing Can Work Together
It’s not exactly breaking news that inbound marketing is the reigning king of conversation (and recommendations) in the marketing world as of late. So, does that mean that good ole’ outbound marketing is dead? Not the way I see it! While inbound marketing has tremendous benefits and a lower cost per lead compared to outbound marketing, I believe the two approaches can work together. Like peanut butter and jelly, inbound marketing and outbound marketing enhance each other, resulting in a more successful marketing strategy than either could produce alone!
People often think of these two marketing approaches as silos, operating as separate entities, but you would be surprised at how perfectly they work together. Below, I've outlined four of the best ways to enrich your marketing tactics by uniting inbound and outbound marketing.
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The Top 3 Sources of Blog Traffic that are NOT on Social Media
It’s well-documented that sharing content on social media is the best way to build readership on your blog. Social media outlets are great because you can build a following of engaged readers, instantly update them whenever you have new content, and expand your reach through Shares and Retweets. There’s no doubt that social media has made blogging easy, right? You can reach your entire audience from the comfort of your Hootsuite, right?
WRONG. While social media offers some essential tools, it can’t reach everyone. As Newsfeeds become more crowded, your post’s time to shine becomes ever more fleeting. Moreover, your network probably doesn’t include all of your target audience, and you’re definitely missing the people who *GASP* aren’t on social networks at all!
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4 Ways to Leverage Case Studies in Your B2B Marketing
One of the biggest challenges for B2B marketers is that we are often selling services, rather than products. Services can be tougher to sell than products because potential customers can’t physically see and touch a service before purchasing it. Thus, the value and benefits of a service are simply harder to see. Fortunately, we B2B marketers have been given the gift of the case study, which lends itself perfectly to demonstrating the value of your firm’s solutions.
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Don’t Get Buried Alive: Effectively Curate and Share B2B Content with Scoop.it
Have you ever seen the TV show, “Hoarding: Buried Alive?” If you haven’t, you need to finish reading this blog, shut your computer down, throw yourself onto the nearest La-Z-boy, and turn on TLC because you are missing one of the most mindlessly addicting experiences in all of basic cable.
Now, those of you who have seen “Hoarding” know it’s about people who find themselves awash with lots and lots and lots of stuff. They have so much stuff because they just don’t know how to separate “good stuff” from “bad stuff” and all the stuff piles up uselessly as a result.
Some stuff is awesome—like the classic car one man buried under 30 years of junk.
Some stuff is garbage— like one couple’s massive collection of… you guessed it… garbage.
Some stuff is just repetitive—there once was a little old lady who owned 6 microwaves.
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Riding the B2B Content Marketing Bull
Bourbon Street, New Orleans – it’s like taking a step around the corner into another world where nothing is taboo. If you have a fun and fearless side, this place will surely bring it out! And YES, this applies to public accountants as well!
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A Pinch of Content, a Sprinkle of SEO and a Dash of Social Media
The Perfect Inbound Marketing Recipe?
145,000 – that is the number of results that I got when Googling, “chicken parm recipes.” My guess is that excluding duplicates, there are recipe variations well into the six figures. I’ll bet there are some fantastic ones that only the gourmet types – and that wouldn’t include me – can make as well as some that can be whipped up by a novice in a flash. The bottom line is that the recipe chosen will depend on the need, preference and skill set of the cook. The same dinner bell rings true for Inbound Marketing programs – there is no one perfect recipe that every firm should use.
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Our Top 10 Best Practices for Blogging
We are constantly hearing about the value of content marketing and passing this information on to our clients. Typically, blogging is the cornerstone of any content marketing plan that we develop for our clients. Blogging draws traffic to your Web site, demonstrates thought leadership, and gives you a great base of content to repurpose for other marketing tactics like newsletters, webinars, and videos. Blogging is one of the best and most cost efficient ways to generate and share your unique thought leadership. With this in mind, we go to great lengths to educate our clients on the basics of blogging and also offer in-depth training sessions with tips and best practices. While the training is great, a one-on-one training session is not always feasible and I found myself in need of a blogging “cheat sheet” so to speak. I wanted to have a quick reference guide that would convey the most important blogging practices (in our eyes). As a result, I've compiled the following list of what we consider to be our Top 10 Blogging Practices:
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Our Top 5 Best Practices for Hosting an Effective Webinar
Are you looking to draw more prospects to your Web site and generate more new leads? Hosting a webinar is one inbound marketing tool that can help you draw in qualified leads. I’ve recently read “The New Rules of Marketing & PR,” by David Meerman Scott. In the book, Scott defines webinars perfectly as, “online seminars that may include audio, video, or graphics (typically in the form of PowerPoint slides) and are often used by companies as a primer about a specific problem that the company’s services can solve.”
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Are You a Content Curator? 5 Great Tools for Content Curation and Sharing
Like me, you may be a “content curator” and not even know it. Lately, I have noticed a number of articles and blog posts with headlines referencing the concept of content curation. I have to admit, before reading these posts, I wasn’t quite sure what exactly it was. I am familiar with content marketing and have found it to be an excellent marketing tool both for Marketri and our clients, so I figured content curation was worth investigating.
You can imagine my surprise after researching this topic, only to discover that I was already curating content on a regular basis! So what exactly is this practice? Content curation is the process of sorting through the sometimes overwhelming amount of content that is on the Web, and presenting it to an audience in an organized and purposeful way to provide learning on a specific topic. This involves regularly reviewing content, scanning for the best pieces of information and selecting the most useful and relevant information to share with your audience to provide value. This could be anything from selecting content on a specific topic and sharing it on your Twitter feed, to creating a blog post that compiles links to other posts on a particular topic of interest. For an excellent breakdown of content curation basics, take a look at this post from Beth Kanter.
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