Podcast Episode 164: Why Legal Marketers Should Remember the Basics and Make Time for Team Coordination

In this episode of the Legal Marketing 2.0 Podcast, Guy is joined by Gina Carriuolo to discuss the importance of remembering the basics and making time for team coordination. Gina is the Chief Marketing Officer at Robinson and Cole, an Am Law 200 firm. Robinson and Cole is also a Mansfield Rule certified firm, established over 175 years ago with 230 attorneys, and is deeply rooted in a culture of collaboration, civility, and inclusion. Gina has over 30 years of legal marketing experience, having served as the director of marketing of Locke Lord and its predecessor firms for 14 years. She now leads the firm’s overall business development, marketing, and communication strategies.

1. What Do You Mean by “Remember the Basics and Make Time for Team Coordination.”?

So we just came out of a little over two years of our media priority being to just put everything online, get all the content out, and make sure we are still being seen online. Everybody was online, and a lot of people are still online. Now that we’re going into hybrid mode, I think we just need to take a step in and really make sure that it’s not a matter of, “We pivoted to digital and when we get back to normal we’re going to pivot back.” Without pivoting at all, we just need to make sure that everyone on the team has the same goal in mind because things are busy and getting busier. It is finding a good understanding of what’s happening within the team, I’m talking internally in the overall marketing team. We have to provide the best service for our lawyers and if we’re just reacting and operating in a reactionary mode, we’re going to miss a lot of opportunities. We should strive to be in a proactive place, have a plan, and watch results. That’s where the pivot comes in; if something’s not working try something else.

2. What Do You Mean by Knowing Your Audience?

We are all in the “more” mode; more webinars, more social, more blog posts, more content, etc. It seemed to me like the audience didn’t matter, it was just about the quantity and making sure to get the blog post out before our competitor. Let’s just make sure we do six webinars this week because we only did four last week. More is still a priority, but I think that we need to all realize we need to make an extra effort to position and format messages. There’s a better chance of getting through to the audience. You have to know what and who you want to reach; an existing client, a potential client, a lateral prospect, or a referral source. Marketing is a service group but it’s external and internal. I am very internally focused, as well as externally focused. Internal referral sources in a firm like mine, with 230 lawyers and 10 offices, laterals were coming in all the time. You will miss a lot of internal cross-marketing opportunities if you do not know the audiences you’re trying to reach. You have lawyers that are great at an in-person setting and others that find the webinar platform better. There are multiple audiences and there are multiple ways that lawyers like to operate as well.

3. How Can You Become a More Proactive Marketing Team?

I truly believe that communication is key within the department as a whole. A completely integrated business development, communications, and marketing team need to work in concert. Every firm is different, but whether it’s a client engagement, a media relations opportunity, a branding email marketing campaign, social media, postings, proposal writing, everyone has the same goal. We’re all trying to ensure that we publicize the best content possible to gain audience engagement. That’s really what it comes down to; we all have a mission, but we’re just going at it a little different way.  Everyone has to make sure they’re communicating with each other.

4. How Are You Able to Repurpose Content?

The content I am talking about could be a legal update- an article, slides for a panel or speaking engagement, a blog post, a book chapter directory, an award and ranking submission. Content is flowing from all different angles. Sometimes it comes in through a practice group meeting and the business development folks sitting in that meeting need to know about it. Sometimes it comes in a reporter’s call after they saw our blog post, and they want to repurpose a blog post or talk to the author. For example, a lawyer writes a blog post or an article which is then shared by the marketing team on social media distributed to subscribers, and can then be republished on the content aggregators. They can pitch it for a published article, such as a third-party publication, or can we brand it to the firm and send it out through email marketing. Is the topic something that can be presented to a specific client? Can this topic be important to a client and how can we get the lawyers together to turn it into something else?

Takeaway: 

Communication among your team and having everyone understand the priority is valuable. Everyone has their job to do, and if everyone’s doing their job that’s fabulous but, if no one’s talking to each other, that creates the problem. Look for opportunities, they’re all there! Take your time to really understand what you’re doing, not just getting something done just to check it off. 

You can find Gina Carriuolo on LinkedIn. 

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