Marketing Tech: Digital Media Is the New Normal

The good news is that digital content affords many distinct advantages over its analogue counterpart, and that's if such counterparts even exist. From enhancing engagement to providing insightful metrics and greater flexibility, digital content is the real king of law firm content marketing.

The Paper Past

As professions go, lawyers have historically been more paper-dependent than most. Consider electronic discovery, the process of requesting and producing electronically stored evidence, including e-mails. While e-mail technology has been in popular use for about two decades, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure ' the official federal guidelines for civil proceedings ' were not officially updated to include the discovery of such electronic records until December 2006.

Even after the rest of the world began to adopt the digital way of life, many law firms clung to their paper records, sometimes renting out physical space ' referred to as document storage centers ' in which to house thousands upon thousands of paper documents. While the need to preserve paper documents at one time made perfect sense, particularly when the verdict was still out on the admissibility of electronic evidence, that time has passed. Yet many within the profession, whether due to habit, inexperience or general distrust of the digital world, still prioritize paper, including when it comes to law firm marketing materials. While there is still a reason to generate certain paper marketing materials, law firms should give a critical eye to which materials would best be served by a digital conversion. Branded collateral, such as business cards and letterheads, definitely still serve a unique purpose, but items such as printed brochures are beginning to seem like antiquities, particularly as a younger, more tech-savvy generation of lawyers and business executives are approaching maturity.”

What Digital Media Do Law Firms Use?

If it can be done in print, chances are it can be done digitally. Take the business card. The paper version isn't going away anytime soon, nor should it. It's hard to compete with such a readily accessible business development tool, and there certainly is something to be said about the relationship between tactility and memory, one of the few shortfalls of digital content.

Still, many law firms do employ the digital version of a business card, known as a vCard, which can be customized at a moment's notice, shared widely and costs virtually nothing to produce and reproduce.

Other common digital media employed by law firms include:

• Law firm e-newsletters: While similar to the paper counterpart, e-newsletters provide a number of unique advantages, including the ability to track open rates and click-through rates. E-newsletters can also serve to directly drive recipients to the law firm's website, thus edging them one step closer to the sales cycle.
• e-Mail blasts: Similar to e-newsletters, these are usually one-off pieces of collateral, such as an office opening announcement or an event invitation. Unlike their paper equivalents, these messages can include multimedia, such as audio, video and animations.
• Holiday e-cards: While there's no question that paper holiday cards have a certain personal appeal that digital can't compete with, the advantage of the digital counterpart is the ability to incorporate an assortment of features, from holiday music to a personalized video greeting.
• Digital brochures: These days if you hand a busy executive a trifold brochure, chances are it's going to end up at the bottom of his briefcase, at the bottom of his desk drawer or at the bottom of his trashcan. Digital brochures, on the other hand, can be e-mailed, which means they will not only remain accessible to the pros-
  pect, perhaps indefinitely, but they also can easily be found through a simple e-mail search. And as with other digital materials, digital brochures can include an assortment of interactive and multimedia content, including hyperlinks that point to the firm website, firm-branded blogs, attorney profiles, practice group descriptions and case studies.
• Webinar and digital presentations: The digital world has replaced more than paper; for better or worse, it at times serves as a substitute for in-person interaction. While it's hard to compete with a face-to-face conversation, we can't always be everywhere at once, and busy lawyers especially have to be judicious with their time. Webinars and digital presentations have become so appealing because they enable the on-the-go professional to share her own thought leadership without the disruptive task of flying across the country for a conference.

What Is the Advantage of Digital Media?

While I have already alluded to some of the advantages of digital media, the following spells out exactly why digital content has a leg up on traditional media.

• Scalability: Because digital media can be shared across social networks and email with the click of a button, one creative campaign has the potential to spread far and wide across the Internet.
• Cost: Digital media can be reproduced and distributed without the added costs of printing and mailing.
• Interactivity: Unlike other forms of media, law firm digital media is not a one-way street. With the right strategy in place, you can create campaigns that do more than explain ' they can engage.”
• Measurability: Digital media provides legal marketers with a treasure-trove of useable metrics, including click-through rates, open rates and bounce rates that give you incredible insight into your audience's behavior.
• Flexibility: Digital content isn't set in stone. As you measure the success of your strategy, making tweaks can be as easy as a few mouse clicks.
• Durability: With digital media, you never have to worry about coffee stains or dog-eared pages.

Taking a Step in the Digital Direction

Whether you're looking to blast an animated holiday card, design a monthly law firm e-newsletter or launch a quarterly Webinar series, there are some specific steps you or an outside agency can assist you with to get your law firm moving in a digital direction.

• Conduct a comprehensive assessment to determine the quality and effectiveness of your current traditional and digital media. Decide which paper materials might best be served by a digital makeover.'
• Conduct competitive analysis to determine what tactics your competition is using so you can remain ahead of the curve.
• Develop a creative strategy to devise a winning plan for your digital media that will elevate your firm's reputation in the marketplace.
• Develop a design to create a look and feel that will make your digital media stand out while driving results.
• Incorporate creative copywriting to ensure your message matches your design and resonates with your audience.
• Craft and implement an SEO strategy to get your online content seen in search engine results.
• Conduct analyses to help you understand the effectiveness of your campaigns and inform your ongoing content strategy.'

Keith Ecker is the Content Strategist at Jaffe PR, a full-service legal marketing and PR agency. He helps strategize and implement effective traditional and digital content solutions for law firms, legal vendors and legal associations. Reach him at [email protected].

You don't have to be a computer scientist to see just how influential digital media has become. Annual statistics compiled by the Pew Research Center show that while newspaper, radio and television news viewership is on a decline, digital media has experienced amazingly sharp growth since 2006. Meanwhile, according to the same study, well over half of Americans own a smartphone, while one in three owns a tablet computer. And, let's not forget social media, which has exploded with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ claiming hundreds of millions of users.

What does this all mean? Digital is the new normal. The way your audience ' a term that applies to all readers and viewers of content, including the prospects you wish to market to, your current clients, referral sources and the media ' ingests information is far different than the way these same individuals received content just a few years ago.

Moreover, the pendulum is unlikely to swing back in the direction of analogue content. Instead, as statistics show, the trend is for an even wider adoption of digital platforms, which will serve to only emphasize the need for law firms to start thinking from a digital vantage point.

The good news is that digital content affords many distinct advantages over its analogue counterpart, and that's if such counterparts even exist. From enhancing engagement to providing insightful metrics and greater flexibility, digital content is the real king of law firm content marketing.

The Paper Past

As professions go, lawyers have historically been more paper-dependent than most. Consider electronic discovery, the process of requesting and producing electronically stored evidence, including e-mails. While e-mail technology has been in popular use for about two decades, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure ' the official federal guidelines for civil proceedings ' were not officially updated to include the discovery of such electronic records until December 2006.

Even after the rest of the world began to adopt the digital way of life, many law firms clung to their paper records, sometimes renting out physical space ' referred to as document storage centers ' in which to house thousands upon thousands of paper documents. While the need to preserve paper documents at one time made perfect sense, particularly when the verdict was still out on the admissibility of electronic evidence, that time has passed. Yet many within the profession, whether due to habit, inexperience or general distrust of the digital world, still prioritize paper, including when it comes to law firm marketing materials. While there is still a reason to generate certain paper marketing materials, law firms should give a critical eye to which materials would best be served by a digital conversion. Branded collateral, such as business cards and letterheads, definitely still serve a unique purpose, but items such as printed brochures are beginning to seem like antiquities, particularly as a younger, more tech-savvy generation of lawyers and business executives are approaching maturity.”

What Digital Media Do Law Firms Use?

If it can be done in print, chances are it can be done digitally. Take the business card. The paper version isn't going away anytime soon, nor should it. It's hard to compete with such a readily accessible business development tool, and there certainly is something to be said about the relationship between tactility and memory, one of the few shortfalls of digital content.

Still, many law firms do employ the digital version of a business card, known as a vCard, which can be customized at a moment's notice, shared widely and costs virtually nothing to produce and reproduce.

Other common digital media employed by law firms include:

• Law firm e-newsletters: While similar to the paper counterpart, e-newsletters provide a number of unique advantages, including the ability to track open rates and click-through rates. E-newsletters can also serve to directly drive recipients to the law firm's website, thus edging them one step closer to the sales cycle.
• e-Mail blasts: Similar to e-newsletters, these are usually one-off pieces of collateral, such as an office opening announcement or an event invitation. Unlike their paper equivalents, these messages can include multimedia, such as audio, video and animations.
• Holiday e-cards: While there's no question that paper holiday cards have a certain personal appeal that digital can't compete with, the advantage of the digital counterpart is the ability to incorporate an assortment of features, from holiday music to a personalized video greeting.
• Digital brochures: These days if you hand a busy executive a trifold brochure, chances are it's going to end up at the bottom of his briefcase, at the bottom of his desk drawer or at the bottom of his trashcan. Digital brochures, on the other hand, can be e-mailed, which means they will not only remain accessible to the pros-
  pect, perhaps indefinitely, but they also can easily be found through a simple e-mail search. And as with other digital materials, digital brochures can include an assortment of interactive and multimedia content, including hyperlinks that point to the firm website, firm-branded blogs, attorney profiles, practice group descriptions and case studies.
• Webinar and digital presentations: The digital world has replaced more than paper; for better or worse, it at times serves as a substitute for in-person interaction. While it's hard to compete with a face-to-face conversation, we can't always be everywhere at once, and busy lawyers especially have to be judicious with their time. Webinars and digital presentations have become so appealing because they enable the on-the-go professional to share her own thought leadership without the disruptive task of flying across the country for a conference.

What Is the Advantage of Digital Media?

While I have already alluded to some of the advantages of digital media, the following spells out exactly why digital content has a leg up on traditional media.

• Scalability: Because digital media can be shared across social networks and email with the click of a button, one creative campaign has the potential to spread far and wide across the Internet.
• Cost: Digital media can be reproduced and distributed without the added costs of printing and mailing.
• Interactivity: Unlike other forms of media, law firm digital media is not a one-way street. With the right strategy in place, you can create campaigns that do more than explain ' they can engage.”
• Measurability: Digital media provides legal marketers with a treasure-trove of useable metrics, including click-through rates, open rates and bounce rates that give you incredible insight into your audience's behavior.
• Flexibility: Digital content isn't set in stone. As you measure the success of your strategy, making tweaks can be as easy as a few mouse clicks.
• Durability: With digital media, you never have to worry about coffee stains or dog-eared pages.

Taking a Step in the Digital Direction

Whether you're looking to blast an animated holiday card, design a monthly law firm e-newsletter or launch a quarterly Webinar series, there are some specific steps you or an outside agency can assist you with to get your law firm moving in a digital direction.

• Conduct a comprehensive assessment to determine the quality and effectiveness of your current traditional and digital media. Decide which paper materials might best be served by a digital makeover.'
• Conduct competitive analysis to determine what tactics your competition is using so you can remain ahead of the curve.
• Develop a creative strategy to devise a winning plan for your digital media that will elevate your firm's reputation in the marketplace.
• Develop a design to create a look and feel that will make your digital media stand out while driving results.
• Incorporate creative copywriting to ensure your message matches your design and resonates with your audience.
• Craft and implement an SEO strategy to get your online content seen in search engine results.
• Conduct analyses to help you understand the effectiveness of your campaigns and inform your ongoing content strategy.'

Keith Ecker is the Content Strategist at Jaffe PR, a full-service legal marketing and PR agency. He helps strategize and implement effective traditional and digital content solutions for law firms, legal vendors and legal associations. Reach him at [email protected].