Ed.Note: This is the latest in a series of posts about being a mother in law, done in collaboration with our friends. mothers esquire.Welcome Stacey Freeman Please return to our page.click here If you would like to donate to MothersEsquire,
As a law firm owner, as you build out the various teams that help your organization run the way you envision, each individual on those teams needs to check certain boxes. Legal content marketing experts and content writers are no exception.
Specifically, content marketing legal professionals should be skilled writers and editors with in-depth knowledge of editorial rules. What you may not know is that the editing rules for the internet and books are not the same. They follow different style guides, but which style guide you use is important because presentation is important.
To further your thought leadership efforts, if you plan to one day write a business book or memoir, consider finding a content marketing professional with both writing and editing skills. This person has already worked with you and your organization, so they know you better than a writer or editor who comes in from outside.
But perhaps most importantly, the legal content marketing professional you hire needs to understand and embrace your core values. Hopefully, you've already taken the time to hone it and communicate it to all your teams. In other words, legal content marketing professionals need to understand various aspects of content marketing. you — Law firm marketing goals, law firm challenges, and you personally. You know, your story: how you got to where you are today (the good, the bad, and the ugly) and where you're headed, personally and professionally. It can be utilized in various ways.
Take, for example, a lawyer mother who transitioned from Biglaw to sole proprietorship to have more control over integrating work and life. That way, even if I have to go back home, I can still be the class mom, chair her PTO committee at the spring carnival, and chaperone her on the occasional school trip. I go to my home office every night at 9pm, after the kids have taken a bath, read a book, and gone to sleep. Alternatively, there are mothers in law who decide to pursue a partnership with their spouse and eventually become partners. She worked at a law firm, but her husband's creative career gave him that flexibility, so she agreed to increase her daytime job from home, at least for the time being.
These are important stories that can help people at a personal crossroads make important life decisions. They are the stories that draw people to you, whether it's your colleagues or customers.
No matter the details, integrating your personal story into your content marketing strategy requires vulnerability, courage, and commitment. Commit not only to yourself and your goals, but also to the legal marketing professionals you are paying your hard-earned money to collaborate with in your legal content marketing efforts. That means it's in your best interest for them to succeed. But to reach new heights, legal content marketing professionals need to be supported in some astute ways, rather than working against them. This can sometimes be done without your knowledge.
Legal content writers know you're busy. But as your partner in leveling up your exposure through the world of legal content marketing, they will inevitably make some simple and logical requests of you to do the job you've asked them to do. will do. Those requests…
Create a team-like environment
If you have a marketing team that performs many tasks, consider including content writers in regularly scheduled team-wide marketing meetings. This creates a sense of cohesiveness between the content writers and the rest of the marketing team. It also allows content creators to witness the flow of ideas, participate and inject their expertise.
Topic ideas often emerge from these conversations. It also helps indicate which subjects in a law firm's client resources could benefit from further elaboration and updating by legal content creators. Finally, a legal content author likely doesn't know all of the data in a law firm's marketing department, and having a frank discussion with her content marketer can help bring more focus to marketing efforts. You can put it.
Maintain a list of running ideas
Creating a central place where you can jot down ideas for future content is a huge asset when working with legal content marketers and content writers. That great idea you had just a moment ago may disappear quickly if you're not careful.
If you're into digital, take advantage of your phone's notepad. You can also dictate using the microphone. If you're a pen-and-paper person, make sure you have some space in your daily planner. Even better, take notes and transfer them to a document shared by you and the content writer. That way, when you need to pull your brain together and choose a topic for the future, you can create a running list from which to choose. Speaking of getting my head together…
meet regularly one-on-one
As a law firm founder or leader, meeting regularly (at least once a month) with your legal content creators will improve the quality of your content many times over. As the saying goes, God is in the details, and only an experienced individual can convey them with the nuance that a skilled legal writer needs to convey them to the public with authenticity. Masu.
No matter what type of content you ask a legal content writer to create, whether it's a law firm blog post, newsletter, ebook, thought leadership article, pitch letter, or engaging social media post, the most important thing behind it is The reasons are as follows. As a law firm leader, or as a law firm, it's important that you build that. Like the ingredients in a recipe, the people, places, and things in each communication help convey, strengthen, and make the message memorable. For the content writer, he needs to talk one-on-one.
respect the meeting
Of course, emergencies occur. However, content should do its best to stick to the schedule he created with the marketing professional. If they were worth salting, they would come to the meeting prepared. Again, content marketing experts know you are busy and respect that your time is valuable.
But so are they, and they work on their schedules just like you do. Just like you, legal content writers have deadlines they must meet regarding their workflow. There is a good chance that these deadlines will affect you, for example if you are working with an external publication on your behalf. In the same way…
Quick response to inquiries
If a content writer contacts you for suggestions, quotes, clarification, approval, or requests of such nature, understand that they are doing so in furtherance of their legal marketing objectives. please. Content marketers research trends, find publications to pitch their content, establish relationships with editors, and write and tailor pitch letters to help users get the most bang for their buck. We work hard behind the scenes to make existing content more versatile.
Requests from content marketing professionals often arrive with built-in time constraints due to editorial calendars, publications, or a combination of both. Therefore, content marketing professionals depend on you to answer their questions quickly, for your benefit and their own.
The content writer will strive to make your inquiry as clear, concise, and preferably painless as possible. A content writer has to keep reaching out to you to get the information they need to move forward with a project, or to get the final go-ahead from you even though you said they would be involved. , it can be painful for everyone involved, not to mention unpleasant, if a content writer has put time in their calendar for you. Ghosting is rude and unprofessional.
provide feedback
Legal content marketers like me chose this career. It's not our name on the byline, it's not our name in the lights, and the brand recognition you receive – the credibility you get from the exposure we provide – is something our clients can't find anywhere else. It could be a tipping point where we choose you instead, but it's not ours. , it feels like a thrill. This feeling means that we are doing our job, a job that requires time, skill, experience, and attention to detail – your attention to detail. But to keep doing that job well, we not only need your feedback, we want it.
We take great pride in our work and all our “wins”. Whether it's a blog post going viral, getting to the first page of Google rankings for a commonly used search term, or a thought leadership article we created with you that you end up seeing. It has become. Your name (as an author or cited expert) in a publication where you were once just a reader is as much yours as it is ours. But to maintain a winning streak, you also need your head and heart for the game.
Stacey Freeman is a writer, journalist, author, and editor based in New York City. Right on Track LLCis a full-service consulting firm dedicated to providing high-quality content and strategy to individuals and businesses. Her work has been published or syndicated in The Washington Post, The Lily (published by The Washington Post), Forbes, Entrepreneur, MarketWatch, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Woman's Day, Town & Country, InStyle, PBS Next Avenue, AARP, and SheKnows It has been. , Yahoo!, MSN, HuffPost, POPSUGAR, Your Teen, Grown & Flown, Scary Mommy, CafeMom, MariaShriver dot com and dozens of other famous platforms around the world. her memoir essay, “I Bought Lingerie for My Husband’s Mistress” was published by Unsolicited Press in 2022. Stacey earned her BA in English from the University at Albany and her J.D. from Boston University School of Law.she can connect with her linkedin, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Twitter/X (book) or by email Stacey.Freeman@WriteOnTrackLLC.com.
