PROMOTING YOUR

EXPERTISEONLINE A GUIDE FOR

IRISH CORPORATE LAWPARTNERS

Content

Content

Public Relations

Online Visibility

Social Media

Advertising

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The Problem 04

Overview 03

Measuring Return on Investment 23

Your Next Step 25

• Maintain and develop thought leadership status

• Showcase the relevant partner(s) competencies to attract new business

• Showcase the firm’s capabilities

Overview

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Many Irish corporate law firms invest considerable resources in producing reports, guides and commentary of an extremely high standard. Typically, the purpose of this is to:

We’ve created this guide to illustrate to you, as a partner, what you could be doing to generate maximum online exposure for your firm’s content.

Getting your name and legal skills seen by a wider audience is vital to attract more work from companies that operate internationally, with an emphasis on those in the Irish Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) sector.

You may not be the person responsible for implementing these tactics but, after browsing this guide, you will have sufficient knowledge to ask your PR, marketing colleagues or external agencies the hard questions to ensure the widest possible visibility for your legal expertise.

To explain some of the tactics outlined here in greater depth, we will use the example of a fictitious report called ‘Brexit & Big Data’.

Our target audience for this report will consist of people with job titles that include, General Counsel, Chief Counsel, or Chief Legal Officer (CLO) in an FDI company based in California, USA.

Any media exposure you, or your firm, get in Ireland is obviously great from a branding and PR perspective, but it generally won’t attract legal business from outside Ireland. Why might that be? Well for starters, an FDI audience outside Ireland is not in the habit of listening to Morning Ireland on RTÉ Radio 1 or reading The Irish Times.

Irish PR firms and marketing professionals typically focus on a national audience, but to maximise exposure, you’ll need to attract business from outside Ireland. In achieving this, the national PR approach has extremely limited value.

If our target CLO in California searches on Google for ‘Brexit’ or ‘Big data’ and your website team has done a decent job, the CLO might find you somewhere on page one or two of Google, but even that’s not guaranteed. Obviously, you would like to be top of the rankings, but this involves huge effort.

Bear in mind that what you see on Google.ie from Ireland is not what will be seen in California on Google.com because of the vagaries of Google’s technology. Searching on Google.ca (Canada) will give you a better sense of what Google.com shows outside Ireland.

Producing content to showcase your skills and provide thought leadership content for your firm can be very time consuming, and therefore difficult to accomplish in a busy law firm. It doesn't matter whether you manage to write all the content yourself or a junior associate provides you with a first draft which you then edit and enhance, before incorporating the design work; it all takes time.

From a PR and promotional perspective, this is what usually happens once a report has been created:

Using these standard methods, it’s unlikely that your content will reach the audience you seek.

If you’re the partner responsible for this content, the key question you should be asking is, which of these standard PR and promotional tactics will ensure that the CLO of a multinational based in California will see your content and recognise you as the expert in Ireland they need to talk to?

The Problem

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• A press release is sent out (and often picked up by traditional media such as RTÉ or The Irish Times)

• It is published on the firm’s website

• Existing and past clients are emailed a link to the report

• It is shared on the firm’s Twitter and LinkedIn accounts

The answer is, none of them!

Gogle Docks - Dublin, Ireland

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Initial PR and Promotion questions to consider:

It is crucial to implement many of these tactics to ensure maximum exposure for any report your firm creates, both immediately and, more critically, over the medium to long term so that when colleagues’ praise of your interview on RTÉ is a dim and distant memory, prospects will still be able to find your legal expertise online.

Have you spoken to all the Irish organisations your firm is a member of, asking them to share your report?

2 Are you advertising your report to everyone in the US who has seen your profile on your firm’s website?

3 Are you advertising your report to a specific target CLO wherever he or she goes online? If not, why not?

4 Are you, as the partner responsible for a report, promoting it to all your personal LinkedIn connections?

5 Are your colleagues promoting it to their LinkedIn connections?

6 Has a SlideShare presentation been created for LinkedIn to ensure maximum visibility?

7 Has an accompanying one-minute video summary been created to promote the report on YouTube, and therefore Google?

8 Are you putting the report in front of the 15,000 Twitter subscribers of General Counsel News?

9 Has your report been added to Wikipedia?

10 Have all Brexit and Big Data blogs and websites globally been informed about your report so they can reference it?

If you are not thinking globally, your personal profile and your firm’s brand are not getting the brand visibility they deserve.

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The Content

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The Content

Research

Research is the foundation of everything that follows. What type of research do you need: desktop, telephone or face-to-face interviews? Many partners do their own research or assign it to a junior. Ideally, your research should be conducted internally by people who understand your firm and exactly what you are trying to achieve, but if you are short of time, you could outsource it - in a way that is consistent with the firm’s branding.

Writing

Writing your report well is essential. Hiring a professional writer is a good investment. Finding freelance writers who understand your niche is relatively easily done on LinkedIn. Provide them with a clear brief, a target word count, and guidance on what you want the report to cover. It’s also helpful to provide a copy of your firm’s ‘Tone of Voice’ guidelines. If you don't have any, explain to the writer how you want your firm to engage with the reader. Do you want to come across as friendly, jovial, authoritative, or avuncular? Decide how you like your brand to be perceived by the reader.

Plan the type of content you intend to create, and the questions it will answer. The perception that good legal advice is readily available abounds. However, strategic business advice that helps minimise risk, aligned with good legal advice, is hard to find.

Creating a high-quality report is done in several stages. Start with a brief that sets out exactly what you want to achieve. Clearly understanding your objective will ensure that your report stays on track at each stage. It also ensures that all of those involved in creating the report understand its purpose and are working towards a common goal.

Design

The design of your report is particularly important as it is the first thing the reader will notice, well before they read the content. You may already have visual brand guidelines in place detailing fonts, photos, illustrations or colour palette. If you don't, remember that the layout and graphics all say something about your brand, so think carefully about your choices. If you don’t have an in-house designer, find a good freelancer or try posting a small design project on Upwork.com or a similar website.

Publishing

To get maximum visibility for your report, make it easy for people to find. It is important that you create the report as a PDF so that people can download it at leisure on any device, but that’s still not enough to maximise exposure. Ideally, you should create both a PDF and a standard web page version to ensure better online visibility. How many of us simply scroll past a download link and scarcely notice it? Being presented up front with the content on a page makes it more likely that the reader will engage with it.

Video

Taking your report and creating a simple 60-second explainer video like this www.tinder.pt/LegalVid1 on your report’s landing page, will increase the chances of people being willing to exchange their details for your report.

Once completed, the video can also be promoted independently of the report by emailing it to clients, and sharing it on LinkedIn and Twitter. This drives exposure.

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Gated versus Ungated

What is your report worth to your business? Clearly the purpose of creating the report is to help promote your expertise and your business to a wider audience. You want people to read it, yet you may not see immediate benefit if you simply allow readers to download the report for free. By allowing free access, you lose the opportunity to build a longer-term connection with readers, and to market your services to them in future. If you have spent time creating a report, consider providing some ‘teaser’ content highlighting its key aspects, and requiring visitors to enter their contact details before they can download it in full. This allows you to measure the report’s visibility and opens up the possibility of marketing to these visitors in future, using either email or advanced online advertising (aka ‘remarketing’) for your next report.

Repurposing your content

The professionals you are targeting are just as busy as you. They may not be inclined to wade through a long report to find out if what you say has any relevance to them. One of the most effective ways of quickly capturing their attention is to summarise your report in a short video or infographic. They’re easier to do than you might think and offer a fast way of digesting information.

Infographic

Another way to generate extra value from your report, and to get your content in front of a wider audience is to create one succinct infographic from the various smaller graphics you might have in the Big Data report. Submit your infographic to the various infographic directoriesthat exist. When the infographic is shared, more people will be drawn to the report than might otherwise have seen it.

• Have your web developers build a visually attractive ‘landing page’ that works well on mobile phones, and requires a user to enter their details in exchange for the report

• Add all the email addresses you harvest to a segmented email newsletter list for future niche targeting

The Content

OPTION 3

OPTION 4

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OPTION 2

OPTION 1

We recommend that you:

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Public Relations

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Public Relations

Research

Well-written content from Irish law firms can usually count on decent coverage in the mainstream Irish media such as The Irish Times, Irish Independent, and RTÉ but getting international coverage is another story. How will your report fare online and in the US? Competition online is stiff so if you want your report to be noticed, you will have to prepare the ground in advance.

Placing your report online via direct contact with journalists in CIO.com, Inc.com, Cnet, Wired, ComputerWeekly, Bloomberg or FT.com will get your law firm - and you, as the relevant partner – a good deal more exposure and potential business in the long term than even a full-page splash in The Irish Times, or another traditional Irish media outlet, which will be forgotten within 24 hours.

If you want your report to get online coverage, write what these journalists want to read. Well ahead of publication, contact the relevant journalists to ask what questions they’d like answered in the report. Incorporate their questions into the report, if possible. If you get back to them with a report that answers the question they asked, you’re giving them an added incentive to cover its publication. Also, your report will be more beneficial to international readers - such as our target CLO or General Counsel - when it answers questions from an international perspective.

Who Has Influence

In the case of the ‘Brexit & Big Data’ or any other niche report, identify the key influencers for Big Data online and mention them in the report. Track down a relevant quote to include in the report. Finding global opinion-leading bloggers and Twitter users such as @ie_bigdata, @analyticbridge, @kirkdborne - who have a combined following of more than 200,000 people - and mentioning them in the report, will give them an incentive to tweet about the report, which will mean that the most influential people globally (rather than just in the US) are likely to see the report. You can take this tack with non-legal Big Data experts as well. Asking for a quote is a good way to pique their interest, and it incentivises them to share your work. If they are prominent on LinkedIn or Twitter, they may well share your report within their professional networks also, exposing it to new horizons.

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Public Relations

Write and Distribute Guest Blogs

Blogs are an increasingly popular news source. Tools such as BuzzSumo have free versions that help you identify the top ‘Big Data’ bloggers. Contact some of the most prominent Big Data blogs to ask if they would like an original 800-word article relating to the report you’ve just created. These blogs are generally keen to accept fresh content once it is a good fit for their audience. If they agree to publish your content, write and send it to them without delay. The writing work can be outsourced, subject of course to compliance, tone of voice, and brand guidelines. Repeat this approach four or five times with the most widely read blogs as it is the most effective way to get maximum long-life exposure on multiple, relevant sites.

Use Your Existing Connections

Which organisations are you a member of? You might be involved with the US or UK Chambers of Commerce, Small Firms Associations or IBEC. Each of these groups will have different questions about the report. Find out what their members want to know, and include these topics in the report. Encourage them to share your content once it has been published.

Improve Your Online Visibility

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Google Rankings (SEO)

Optimise Your Content Online

Creating an impressive, expensive website doesn’t necessarily mean that your content will be found easily by someone searching on Google. Unless you carefully optimise every aspect of your website, you may find your report or profile buried deeply in Google. If you want your enquiries to increase, make sure that people can find you. SEO specialists (such as ourselves!) will ensure that every page of your website is properly optimised for maximum visibility. One of the most effective ways to rank highly on Google is to create detailed, valuable content that is targeted to a specific topic.

If you create a 1,000-word article summarising the main points of your report, you will have exactly the kind of content Google loves and, as a result, you will rank highly internationally for ‘Big Data’ searches. Remember to include relevant images and use bullet points to improve your content’s visual appeal. The more detailed and focused you can make your article, the higher it will rank in Google. Ideally, you want this article to direct visitors straight to a landing page where they can view or download your report.

Improve Your Online Visibility

Approach Relevant Sites

Search for reputable third-party sites that would benefit from knowing about your report. A website such as www.ibmbigdatahub.com has approximately 2,000 other sites that reference it online. You can be sure that some of these websites are relevant for your report. Contact some of them and ask if they are aware of your report, and whether they would like to reference it? Everyone benefits from this. The website gets to include a reference that increases its usefulness, and you get a link from a relevant website. (The more of such links you have, the more dominant your firm will be on Google globally). This will improve your report’s visibility online and make it easier to find.

Add Your Report to Wikipedia

It is definitely worth having your report listed on Wikipedia. Adding it to the topics of ‘Brexit’ or ‘Big Data’ will ensure that anyone using Wikipedia to read about those subjects will discover your report and see it listed as an authoritative source.

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Improve Your Online Visibility

Google Ads (PPC)

Don’t just focus on improving organic traffic to your website, consider online advertising as well. Google AdWords is probably the most effective way of advertising online. Correctly done, it can benefit your business significantly and boost your report’s visibility. Most web searches globally are done using Google. A person searching Google for terms such as, ‘data privacy Ireland’, ‘data centres Ireland’, ‘big data laws Ireland’ will be served with your firm’s ad at the top of the search results - with a little help from Google AdWords.

Your marketing colleague may tell you, ‘oh we do that already’ but in our experience, it is highly unlikely that the targeting of multiple terms relevant to your report is happening and even if it is, it is usually done only in Ireland – where your target audience is not!

This is a great way to get relevant exposure at negligible cost. Your outlay will depend on the markets you target, and whether you want to appear at the top of search results or are content lower down the page. The budget is entirely under your control, and you can set the figure you are willing to spend each day to achieve a certain level of exposure.

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Social Media

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Get colleagues to share

Don't forget that it's not just you on LinkedIn. Your colleagues are also probably active there, often with their own separate network of followers, so it makes sense to ask them to share an update about your ‘Brexit & Big Data’ report. Obviously, you should reciprocate if they ask you to return the favour.

Having your colleagues share the report within their networks is much more effective than just emailing the report. Sharing a report on your personal profile is seen as an endorsement and has a lot more longevity than a generic email.

Optimise your partner profile

If you are a partner in an Irish Law firm, you probably already have a LinkedIn profile. If you don’t, set one up. Your LinkedIn profile can be an effective way to demonstrate your expertise. Don't just settle for the basic name and biographical details. Improve your profile by adding presentations, your published articles, and perhaps a profile video to help you stand out. The more content that’s here, the more credible you appear. Remember that people are quick to judge you online so first impressions matter.

Add the Big Data report to your profile too to ensure it is visible when a potential prospect looks you up. This will help not just with the report’s visibility, but your own online credibility. While working on your LinkedIn profile, it would be a good idea to post an article on LinkedIn with a summary of the report. Such summaries will often get picked up by Google and this will further extend the report’s visibility.

LinkedIn

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Share on the firm’s LinkedIn page

You may have written the report, but it was produced by your firm and bears its name. Your marketing colleagues should be sharing it on the firm’s LinkedIn page. For maximum engagement, make sure you use appealing photos and imagery. Ask organisations that you associate with to promote the report on their LinkedIn company pages. Why not see if the IDA, the American Chamber of Commerce and Enterprise Ireland, for example, are willing to promote it on their LinkedIn pages. Ask and you shall receive – maybe!

Connect with relevant prospects

When you have added the report to your LinkedIn profile, you have an opportunity to enhance your network with relevant contacts. Connect with the people who show up on LinkedIn when a search is done for ‘General Counsel’ in the San Francisco Bay Area of the US. You can do this over a few weeks so it doesn't take too much time, or even outsource this task. The likelihood of these people being willing to connect is infinitely greater when they see how you are relevant to them. The presence of the report on your profile provides that relevance and makes the connection more likely.

Use contacts in LinkedIn groups

One of the most useful features of LinkedIn is the groups you can join. Big Data groups on LinkedIn abound. For example, https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4332669/profile has 270,000 members. Many of these would be interested in reading your report. All you have to do is tell them about it, but tread carefully. Don't join the group and immediately announce your report. LinkedIn groups are all about community and your report recommendation will have more impact if you are a regular contributor to the group. Post friendly, informative messages before diving in to promote your report.

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Follow in advance of publishing

On Twitter, it pays to do some work before your report is ready. Run a search to identify key people to whom your report is relevant. Follow them on Twitter and in the weeks before publication, catch their attention by retweeting them. When your report is ready to share with your followers, chances are they will tweet it to their followers as well.

Ask contacts to share

Look through your Twitter contacts to see who has the largest following. Contact them and ask if they would be willing to share your material with their followers. Extend this approach to organisations with which your firm associates professionally. If you have connections with business or enterprise groups, now is the time to get in touch. Ask them to tweet your report to their followers. They may not oblige but there’s no harm in asking. Potentially, it could put your report in front of a lot more readers.

For corporate law firms, we recommend that you restrict your Facebook activities to ‘Remarketing’. This highly effective tactic allows you to advertise to people who have previously visited your website or shown interest in you in some way. Remarketing ads can be placed on Google also but Facebook tends to have a lower cost. The reason is that Facebook users, in theory, are not looking for your services when they see your ad. The truth is that Facebook remarketing can actually be highly targeted. You can set tight parameters around your campaign, and select a particular audience from those who visited your website but have yet to become clients.

We have already seen the advantages of creating a short, 60-90 second ‘explainer’ video that sums up the key points your report. It can serve as a great introduction to your report for C-level executives who are pressed for time. Video reaches an audience that wouldn’t necessarily see your written report. Remember to put it on your firm’s YouTube channel to expand the reach of your report. Consider also distributing it around the web through a system such as TubeMogul to further maximise exposure. Video is first choice for many people – even senior executives - so creating and promoting one is the obvious way to reach them.

Twitter Facebook

YouTube and other video websites

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Advertising

• Your existing LinkedIn connections(their email details are downloadable from LinkedIn)

• Your firm’s email newsletter list

• Business cards you have been given

Using Email Differently

You probably have access to lots of email addresses by means such as:

These email addresses can be collated into a single list and uploaded securely and anonymously (using a technology called ‘hashing’ to ensure full data protection compliance) to companies such as Google, Twitter, and AdRoll. If these companies can match some of the emails on your list with emails they already have, you can advertise your ‘Brexit & Big Data’ report around the internet to many of those whose email addresses you already have. They will already be familiar with your firm and might want to read your report.

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To ensure a report such as ‘Brexit & Big Data’ is seen by the maximum number of relevant prospects, you will need to promote it. Simply creating it and putting it on your site is not enough. Advertising options vary and some are more expensive than others, but by applying the right level of precision, your campaigns can be highly targeted and effective.

For example, you could advertise the report to the 4,000 Directors, VPs, and CXOs in companies with more than 200 sta� in the US San

Francisco Bay Area of the US who are interested in Big Data.

LinkedIn advertising

LinkedIn offers many opportunities for focused advertising. For senior executives, LinkedIn is far preferable to Facebook. The business environment and focus of the platform mean that your ads are more likely to get a positive response. LinkedIn also allows you to target your ads by B2B demographics, including industry, job title, or membership of a particular LinkedIn group. This works well for professional users.

When you set up a LinkedIn ad, it will appear in two places on the website. Visitors see it on the sidebar with an image and text, but you should also get a text-only version at the top of LinkedIn.LinkedIn ads typically include a photo, a 25-character headline and a 75-character description. You can run a campaign based on either impressions (the number of times your ad is shown) or the number of times your ad is clicked on.

San FranciscoBay Area Big Data and Analytics,Big Data Professionals, Scientist Architect,

Analyst Developer Engineer CDO, Analytics Mining Science, Big Data,

Analytics, Strategy, Finance, Innovation

201-500 employees, 501 - 1000 employees, 1001-5000 employees,

5001-10,000 employees, 10,001 + employeesDirector, CXO, VP

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Twitter offers the possibility of relevant, highly targeted advertising. You could, for example, advertise the Big Data report to people in a specific geographical region, such as the San Francisco Bay Area of the US, specifically followers of the main Big Data influencers.

There are many ways of advertising on Twitter so think carefully about the one best suited to your goals. Ask yourself what will put your report in front of the largest number of people.

You could try:

• Promoted Tweets: These will show one of your normal tweets to a wider audience than would normally see it

• Website Cards: These are similar to normal tweets but also include a photo, a headline and a ‘read more’ button

• Video Ads: Since you might be creating a short explainer video for your report, why not promote it on Twitter. Users will watch the video and click through to access the report

• Promoted Trends: Consider buying a spot on Twitter’s ‘trending’ widget to get greater visibility.

Twitter advertising

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Remarketing

Have you ever visited a website only to be followed around the web by that website’s ads? That’s remarketing in action. Remarketing is a great way to boost your visibility and improve your ROI because the people who see your ads are already familiar with you. You do not need to start from first principles every time.

They know who you are and what you can do for them. They just need to be reminded that you are there and that you can help them. They may not have engaged your services yet, but they recognise your photo and understand your offer so they will be receptive to your message.

It’s simple to get started with remarketing. Ask your web people to add some code to your website so that, when someone visits – without leaving an email address or downloading the report - you will be able to advertise the report to that person as they browse elsewhere. This means they won’t forget about it.

There’s usually only a cost when someone clicks on your ad, which means remarketing offers plenty of free brand visibility. Adding remarketing code to your website will help with your future online visibility so do it now as it’s incredibly cheap.

Native Advertising

Native advertising is an increasingly popular way of getting a message across in a world saturated with ads. For many people, it doesn't matter how good an ad is, they will ignore it anyway. Many have become conditioned to ignoring online advertising.

Native Advertising gets around this by providing paid content ‘in feed’ in a non-disruptive manner. It features ads that look like editorial (or native) content, rather than ads. Promoted tweets on Twitter, and sponsored posts on LinkedIn are common examples of this type of advertising.

Native Advertising works. It is known to be better at building trust and engagement with prospective customers than traditional display ads. You can use companies such as Outbrain, Taboola, and Gemini to promote your content. Costs are minimal, running at approximately 10-30c for every click on your ad, and content appears on websites such as Independent.ie or Guardian.co.uk in the countries of your choice.

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Measuring Return on Investment

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You will invest a lot of time and money to promote your report, but how do you know if your efforts have been successful? Three things can be used to gauge how successful your promotional efforts have been.

You can track:

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Tracking the amount of traffic reaching your website is important. It doesn't tell you how many people read your report but it can tell if there is a problem with your website. If a lot of people reach your website but very few sign up or read the report, you will need to investigate whether there is a technical issue with the website, or whether you have a conversion issue. What is it about your website that is stopping people downloading the report?

Tracking sign-ups is great but it doesn't tell you how many people have read the report. It tells you instead how many contact details you have gathered, so that you can contact them later to remind them to read the report or to ask for feedback. Store these details so that you can inform these people of future reports.

Tracking document views will give you the clearest indication of who is actually reading your report. You will need to consider both those who read the document online, and those who download it for offline reading.

• Tra�c reaching your website

• Visitors who sign-up to download your report

• Views of your report

The Warehouse26A Mount Eden RoadDonnybrook, Dublin 4

www.tinderpoint.com

THE NEXT

STEPProducing your report is not an end in itself. It is a means of promoting your legal expertise and your firm, to encourage a wider audience to engage with you. Implementing some or all of the tactics outlined in this guide will enable you to increase the number of legal enquiries you attract for the benefit of both you and your firm from a much wider international audience.

(01) 485 2611 hello@tinderpoint.com

Call us today & tell us your problem:

Always remember, you’re the legal specialist who solves problems for people. Your biggest challenge is simply to put your expertise in front of more prospects.

Tinderpoint can help you. Give us a quick call and let us work out a plan to increase your online visibility and attract more legal enquiries.

PROMOTING YOUR

EXPERTISEONLINE A GUIDE FOR

IRISH CORPORATE LAWPARTNERS