From the Toronto Marketing Blog: Post-pandemic law firm marketing (19 legal influencers chime in).

Larry Bodine, Business Development Advisor at Larry Bodine Marketing

“The hottest thing to hit legal marketing in 10 years is Zoom meetings and webinars.

It allows attorneys to film videos of themselves, interview clients and colleagues, host live online meetings, and present business development webinars. Get the business or enterprise version for $19.99 per host, per month.

With in-person marketing eliminated because of the pandemic, now is the time for attorneys to dive into digital marketing. Zoom has 12.92 million monthly active users, up 21% since the end of 2019.

Zoom is a great way to build up your email list, because attendees register with their email addresses. Further, Zoom recordings can easily be uploaded to YouTube and shared on Facebook. Videos are very powerful – 80% of people would rather watch a video than read text online.

It's important to learn the security settings, so you can avoid having your meetings ‘Zoombombed' by hackers.

Here are some tips:

• Use the audio transcript option (under ‘Cloud Recording') to automatically transcribe the audio of a meeting or webinar that you record to the cloud.
• With a virtual background, you can upload an image of anything you want. Webinars are the second-most effective form of legal marketing, after in-person meetings.
• Invite your favorite clients to a regular Q&A hangout, where you answer questions from potential and current clients about problems they have that can be solved by legal services.

Sandra Bekhor, Practice Development Consultant at Bekhor Management

Good legal marketing depends on aligning your message with your market's needs. But great legal marketing goes beyond rational arguments like years of experience. It connects on an emotional level. It doesn't just tell the reader that you're competent. It tells the reader that you understand their worries and you can remove them. It helps the reader imagine how it would feel to work with your people.

Due to the sensitive nature of your work, as lawyers, you are well poised to pick up the broken pieces and create opportunities from this rubble. Consider what's important to your firm, your partners, and your staff. Is there a new initiative you can launch that communicates your ideals and values? Is there a better way to articulate your approach or style? Is there a cause that you can get behind to mobilize action?

“Now is the time to take your law firm marketing to the next level.

Garry Wise, Founder and Senior Lawyer at Wise Law

“The time for post-pandemic planning and marketing is now.  

These important tasks are complicated, however, by the many unknowns now presenting about the future.  

• How will COVID change the landscape of the legal marketplace? Will those changes be temporary or permanent?
• How will we be meeting and communicating, moving forward? Will we be virtual forever, or will in-person appointments and attendances someday return?
• What will litigation and the courts look like in the short and long-term futures? How will updated court procedures, technology and infrastructure affect how we work and interact with our clients and peers?

We may not know the answers to some of these questions, but there is still a story to be told about our firms and the lawyers we work with.

I would suggest that the primary objective of our post-pandemic marketing efforts is to provide reassurance as to our firms' continued stability and our ability to move forward to respond to whatever change lies ahead. The message might be, ‘whatever comes, we will be ready.' This can be dealt with in a formal fashion on our websites or blogs, or through video from your home office, or short memes and posts on social media, with or without images to enhance the message.

We have certainly learned since March that the legal profession can and will adapt with success to whatever conditions present. A good place to start in our marketing, therefore, is to reassure our clients that we will continue to be nimble and responsive to their requirements as the post-COVID world slowly re-emerges.

People will continue to have legal issues. The important marketing message for law firms, therefore, is to let our marketplaces know we are fully functioning, able to navigate the emerging new requirements of the Courts, and are now using the best available technologies to ensure their needs as our clients will continue to be carefully and efficiently attended to.

And then, we must deliver.”

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