Marketing Tech: Using Technology to Streamline Content Marketing

With the acceptance of e-mail and e-mail marketing (at least among senders), legal content marketing began its electronic evolution about 10 years ago. The medium changed, but not so much the message. Newsletters/alerts were still general in their scope and reach and as such were sent broadly, sometimes to all contacts regardless of their industry or legal need. Broad, but not deep. At Foley Hoag (where Jasmine is Director of Marketing & Business Development), the real change began about four years ago. Clients were determined to control their legal fees, and as part of this, many of them built out their in-house legal teams from those associates, counsel and even partners who no longer had a place in law firms. With such skilled knowledge in house, they no longer needed their law firms to provide them with the general client updates. Now they were looking for specialized content targeted to their specific needs.

Foley's Initiatives

Like most firms, prior to 2008, Foley spent considerable resources on branding initiatives, including print advertising in general business and industry-specific publications. These kinds of initiatives had started to see diminishing returns right before the recesssion. Once the recession hit, law firms felt, and rightly so, that brand advertising was not a good use of firm dollars, as it could not be tied to revenue generation. With brand advertising, off the table, the challenge was to find another strategy that would be more cost effective and drive revenue generation. Three things were apparent: 1) That clients still demanded content, now though it had to be more focused and targeted to their needs; 2) That lawyers were excellent at writing and talking and could create good content with guidance on making it business-focused; and 3) The Internet and social media were forever changing how people found lawyers, how they researched lawyers and how they shared information about lawyers.

Thus, the firm began formulating a new content marketing strategy, with the objective of joining the expertise residing in the firm with the depth of information our clients desired and a delivery mechanism that was acceptable to all parties. On one level, there was always going to be a need for alerts, but they'd have to be much more detailed and tailored to a specific area of endeavor ' narrow and deep, though at the same time, accessible. It was not realistic to think we could continue to send along 10-page memos. The firm would need to deliver very specific and timely bits of information to corporate counsel in a form that they'd be willing to pass along to their CEO. Likewise, it would be beneficial for the firm brand if this valuable content were shared with a broader audience via social media.

An offshoot of Foley Hoag's content marketing was an initiative to bring attorneys up to speed quickly on their clients' industries and specific problems facing entities in those industries. In the post-recession era, firms win new business by illustrating their understanding of a potential client's industry and being able to articulate how they can help. Possession of this kind of broad-based client knowledge has not always been a given for attorneys in most law firms; after all, they're trained to be more focused on very specific legal issues.

Business Platforms

Feeding the Ceaseless Demand For On-Point, Timely Content

The strategy of leveraging Foley Hoag's expertise to provide meaningful alerts to clients and potential clients ' while also arming the firm's attorneys with the current industry information that would position them well when networking among prospects ' seemed sound. The challenge, it was soon realized, would be gathering new developments in a timely manner with a lean staff. It was not feasible to allocate considerable staff time to manually compile this information. The firm would need some technical muscle to help automate this process.

Peers had had good things to say about a business intelligence platform from a company called Manzama. Business intelligence platforms (sometimes called listening platforms) might be described as “Google Alerts on steroids.” They deploy a more sophisticated analytics framework to cull through search results to deliver on-point information to each stakeholder within the organization, based on what they need to know. It might be thought of as a form of vertical searching for each discipline within the firm. Users set up parameters about what clients, industries, practice areas (and other search parameters) they want to follow; the application then searches and analyzes legal and industry-specific news sources, blogs, Twitter feeds and other social media, as well as any proprietary content the firm might subscribe to, and delivers only results that are relevant to the user, categorized in a manner that places that information in a clear context. Search results appear in a list with synopses below so the user can judge each result's relevance, and then click through to review full text and save to a report.

A number of firms had been using business intelligence platforms like Manzama to better understand clients' industries, identify potential threats to client interests and uncover developments that could lead to new engagements. Foley recognized that the platform could be used to generate content for a number of client-facing communications, including blogs, alerts, newsletters, and events. It could also be used to automate the aggregation and distribution of information about clients and key practice areas, providing attorneys fodder for aforementioned networking opportunities. Working with Manzama's professional services team, Foley Hoag set up automatic, direct feeds from Manzama (based on very specific queries) to the firm's external facing microsite focused on technology and entrepreneurship. This site is meant to engage local technology entrepreneurs by delivering information that will help them as they develop their business plans and grow their company.

Case in Point

Spotlighting Corporate Responsibility Practice

We all know it can be very hard to track the specific source of new business. You can play the guessing game all day ' did that engagement come from that blog posting or this infographic or that seminar? While it's difficult to draw a straight line between Foley Hoag's revamped content marketing initiatives and signed contracts, there's one recent example that suggests it's working.

Foley Hoag has a practice uncommon in most law firms: Corporate Social Responsibility. Traditionally, clients have looked to corporate social responsibility consultants to address issues of compliance, though there are very good reasons for attorneys to be doing this sort of work. To communicate these reasons ' and pressing concerns in this arena ' the firm established a blog on the topic, Corporate Social Responsibility and the Law. The face of the blog has been Sarah Altschuller, an associate in Foley's DC office. (Other major contributors to the blog include Gare Smith, Amy Lehr and Vivek Krishnamurthy.) In addition to the blog, Ms. Altschuller Tweets on corporate social responsibility and posts content on Facebook.

Not long after launching the blog, the firm had a call from a Fortune 100 company on the West Coast. Foley Hoag doesn't have an office in California, and there's really no reason this entity should have known about the firm. They reached out thanks to the content they'd found on the Corporate Social Responsibility blog, content that had been identified and gathered by Manzama.

The contact has not yet resulted in an engagement, but the fact that Foley even got in the door is huge.

Jasmine C. Trillos-Decarie is Director of Marketing & Business Development at Foley Hoag, based in Boston. Peter J. Ozolin is co-founder and CEO of Manzama, Inc., a provider of business intelligence platforms for the legal profession and other professional services organizations based in Bend, OR.

Google the phrase “content marketing” and the CPU on your notebook or tablet will almost explode with search results. Content marketing is hot, especially if you're trying to market legal services.

A case could be made, however, that content marketing has been with us for a long time. Back in the 90s (the 1990s that is), we used to call it a “newsletter” or “client alert.” Sending out alerts about new statutes or novel interpretations of the law and how it could impact one industry sector or another was not only good client service; it showcased the firm's expertise surrounding focus practices to the broader market and even the media. Back in the day, this content was printed on five or 10 pages of paper, stuck in an envelope and mailed. It seems almost quaint now!

Electronic Evolution

With the acceptance of e-mail and e-mail marketing (at least among senders), legal content marketing began its electronic evolution about 10 years ago. The medium changed, but not so much the message. Newsletters/alerts were still general in their scope and reach and as such were sent broadly, sometimes to all contacts regardless of their industry or legal need. Broad, but not deep. At Foley Hoag (where Jasmine is Director of Marketing & Business Development), the real change began about four years ago. Clients were determined to control their legal fees, and as part of this, many of them built out their in-house legal teams from those associates, counsel and even partners who no longer had a place in law firms. With such skilled knowledge in house, they no longer needed their law firms to provide them with the general client updates. Now they were looking for specialized content targeted to their specific needs.

Foley's Initiatives

Like most firms, prior to 2008, Foley spent considerable resources on branding initiatives, including print advertising in general business and industry-specific publications. These kinds of initiatives had started to see diminishing returns right before the recesssion. Once the recession hit, law firms felt, and rightly so, that brand advertising was not a good use of firm dollars, as it could not be tied to revenue generation. With brand advertising, off the table, the challenge was to find another strategy that would be more cost effective and drive revenue generation. Three things were apparent: 1) That clients still demanded content, now though it had to be more focused and targeted to their needs; 2) That lawyers were excellent at writing and talking and could create good content with guidance on making it business-focused; and 3) The Internet and social media were forever changing how people found lawyers, how they researched lawyers and how they shared information about lawyers.

Thus, the firm began formulating a new content marketing strategy, with the objective of joining the expertise residing in the firm with the depth of information our clients desired and a delivery mechanism that was acceptable to all parties. On one level, there was always going to be a need for alerts, but they'd have to be much more detailed and tailored to a specific area of endeavor ' narrow and deep, though at the same time, accessible. It was not realistic to think we could continue to send along 10-page memos. The firm would need to deliver very specific and timely bits of information to corporate counsel in a form that they'd be willing to pass along to their CEO. Likewise, it would be beneficial for the firm brand if this valuable content were shared with a broader audience via social media.

An offshoot of Foley Hoag's content marketing was an initiative to bring attorneys up to speed quickly on their clients' industries and specific problems facing entities in those industries. In the post-recession era, firms win new business by illustrating their understanding of a potential client's industry and being able to articulate how they can help. Possession of this kind of broad-based client knowledge has not always been a given for attorneys in most law firms; after all, they're trained to be more focused on very specific legal issues.

Business Platforms

Feeding the Ceaseless Demand For On-Point, Timely Content

The strategy of leveraging Foley Hoag's expertise to provide meaningful alerts to clients and potential clients ' while also arming the firm's attorneys with the current industry information that would position them well when networking among prospects ' seemed sound. The challenge, it was soon realized, would be gathering new developments in a timely manner with a lean staff. It was not feasible to allocate considerable staff time to manually compile this information. The firm would need some technical muscle to help automate this process.

Peers had had good things to say about a business intelligence platform from a company called Manzama. Business intelligence platforms (sometimes called listening platforms) might be described as “Google Alerts on steroids.” They deploy a more sophisticated analytics framework to cull through search results to deliver on-point information to each stakeholder within the organization, based on what they need to know. It might be thought of as a form of vertical searching for each discipline within the firm. Users set up parameters about what clients, industries, practice areas (and other search parameters) they want to follow; the application then searches and analyzes legal and industry-specific news sources, blogs, Twitter feeds and other social media, as well as any proprietary content the firm might subscribe to, and delivers only results that are relevant to the user, categorized in a manner that places that information in a clear context. Search results appear in a list with synopses below so the user can judge each result's relevance, and then click through to review full text and save to a report.

A number of firms had been using business intelligence platforms like Manzama to better understand clients' industries, identify potential threats to client interests and uncover developments that could lead to new engagements. Foley recognized that the platform could be used to generate content for a number of client-facing communications, including blogs, alerts, newsletters, and events. It could also be used to automate the aggregation and distribution of information about clients and key practice areas, providing attorneys fodder for aforementioned networking opportunities. Working with Manzama's professional services team, Foley Hoag set up automatic, direct feeds from Manzama (based on very specific queries) to the firm's external facing microsite focused on technology and entrepreneurship. This site is meant to engage local technology entrepreneurs by delivering information that will help them as they develop their business plans and grow their company.

Case in Point

Spotlighting Corporate Responsibility Practice

We all know it can be very hard to track the specific source of new business. You can play the guessing game all day ' did that engagement come from that blog posting or this infographic or that seminar? While it's difficult to draw a straight line between Foley Hoag's revamped content marketing initiatives and signed contracts, there's one recent example that suggests it's working.

Foley Hoag has a practice uncommon in most law firms: Corporate Social Responsibility. Traditionally, clients have looked to corporate social responsibility consultants to address issues of compliance, though there are very good reasons for attorneys to be doing this sort of work. To communicate these reasons ' and pressing concerns in this arena ' the firm established a blog on the topic, Corporate Social Responsibility and the Law. The face of the blog has been Sarah Altschuller, an associate in Foley's DC office. (Other major contributors to the blog include Gare Smith, Amy Lehr and Vivek Krishnamurthy.) In addition to the blog, Ms. Altschuller Tweets on corporate social responsibility and posts content on Facebook.

Not long after launching the blog, the firm had a call from a Fortune 100 company on the West Coast. Foley Hoag doesn't have an office in California, and there's really no reason this entity should have known about the firm. They reached out thanks to the content they'd found on the Corporate Social Responsibility blog, content that had been identified and gathered by Manzama.

The contact has not yet resulted in an engagement, but the fact that Foley even got in the door is huge.

Jasmine C. Trillos-Decarie is Director of Marketing & Business Development at Foley Hoag, based in Boston. Peter J. Ozolin is co-founder and CEO of Manzama, Inc., a provider of business intelligence platforms for the legal profession and other professional services organizations based in Bend, OR.