15 ideas to jumpstart non-marketing staff

Editor's Notes

• #3: 1. A great first step in jump starting some ideas for marketing your bar programs, events and campaigns is to get a game plan down on paper. 2. What you are seeing on the screen is an example of one month out of our SFBAR 2015 Marketing Plan template. I would suggest that you create a monthly marketing plan document for yourself that lists every publication and all your social media platforms that you have available to you, including press releases. 3. You can use a document like this to take one event or campaign, for example, and list every way you will promote that item for the month. 4. You should then write posts geared for each publication, print and electronic, as well as social media, and then distribute that content to the appropriate staff person if you have someone in charge of communications at the bar other than yourself. Like I mentioned before, our marketing plan for a month includes every publication we produce in a month, print and electronic and their deadlines to submit content. The marketing plan document should also include all of the social media platforms your association uses. We provide this document to every department at the beginning of the year to help those departments map out their content for the year. Getting this information down on paper is a great way for the various departments, including those not typically focused on marketing, to visualize how one event or campaign will be marketed over one month, several months or even over a year.
• #5: Let me preface this by saying we stole this marketing idea from Tim Eigo of the State Bar of Arizona. Whether the event planner, or section chair, or a staff person writes it, a compelling ‘Five Reasons to Attend this conference” type post is a great marketing tool to spread the word about an event. A post like this can be looked at as the starting point for the marketing of an event. You can use it in your bar publications as a: Blog post Member Magazine or newspaper article Enewsletter blurb And further, you can then take each one of the reasons listed in the original post and use those as separate Tweets Facebook posts or LinkedIn Company or Group Posts – all with links back to the event registration page.  So starting out with an article like this is really a great way for you to market a program over a few weeks time
• #6: Some examples
• #7: Sayre’s idea to write an article or blog post on the ‘top reasons to attend’ is a great way to use content snippets from an event to market it. In a similar manner, you can extract even more content from an event – consider building the following marketing arc. Leading up to the event, you have your ‘top reasons to attend’ article. You could create other event teasers, like an infographic or a graphic showing a memorable quote from the presenter. At the event, consider recording the presentation and making it available on demand or as a podcast later on. You could also interview the presenter Or consider collecting testimonials from the attendees. You can use those to promote the next event. After the event, ask someone to write an article with key takeaways from the event. (can also serve to promote the webinar recording) Or repurpose the presentation slides from the event – upload them to slideshare, for instance. These are some ideas adapted from an infographic by BeaconLive – you can find the link in the resource handout. (from BeaconLive)
• #8: I think this image captures a great idea for written communications! I thought this was fitting because I think in marketing we tend to get wordy and say more than we really need to. Often times even a written message or email can be sent in 140 characters or less, not just on Twitter. With that said, lets talk about using Twitter wisely when marketing a bar program or campaign.
• #9: When marketing an event, you need to use those 140 characters wisely and the first tip I have is to not use all 140 characters The website Buffer has a blog post that talks about the ideal length of every social media update and it suggests tweets should be between 70-100 characters. According to their research, tweets less than 100 characters have a 17% higher engagement rate. And engagement is the goal. The more people who interact with your tweet the longer it will live in the Twittersphere. And the more it gets shared, commented on or favorited by someone, the more expanded your potential reach has become for promoting your event or campaign. 
• #10: Twitter is such a fast paced, constantly rotating newsfeed of information that it is more than likely your tweet will not be seen by everyone who follows you. So, tweet about an event several times leading up to it, including the day before and the morning of to increase your chances of people seeing the tweet. 2. And don’t just tweet about your event’s most basic details. Check out the difference between the two tweets on the slide. Take every opportunity to include speakers twitter handles, firms twitter handles. Most likely and in my experience, when we go the extra step to include the firms and speakers handles they will then share the tweet to their followers as well – which is an easy way to expand the reach of your programs and campaigns through Twitter. If you’re not that active on Twitter but want to be, I suggest you start following law firms and your members if they have Twitter accounts. Law firms are easy to find on Twitter but members with personal Twitter accounts are a little harder to find. You’ll need to do your research. One tip is to start by asking your board members and section chairs if they have Twitter accounts. Another tip to get this information is to include a field on your seminar planning documents about Twitter and ask event speakers if they have Twitter accounts or if the company they work for does. If they do, when you send out tweets about the event, use those Twitter handles.
• #11: As Sayre just pointed out, the key to social marketing is to get people to share your content…..preferably enthusiastically. But all too often, when you ask people to spread the word about your event, people simply don’t have the time to learn about your event and to write something compelling to share with their networks. You can increase your chances by making it easy for people to spread the word. Put together a one-page event promotion sheet that includes: The basics: web address, twitter handle, hashtags Sample tweets Presenters/ speakers’ twitter handles Participant quotes Sample listserv posting text (copied from Ms. JD promotion sheet) When you ask people to spread the word about your event, all they need to do is copy and paste.
• #15: Print is hot – as online space and inboxes become cluttered and email messages remain unseen or unopened, print once again stands out If you send me an email and hand me a postcard about the same event – there’s only one of those marketing pieces I can put on my refrigerator (or filing cabinet). The postcard serves as a lasting reminder, long after I forget about the email I may or may not have opened. According to Kim Caviness, chief content officer at McMURRY/TMG, a marketing communications consulting firm that specializes in content marketing – this trend – bringing print marketing back into the mix – is a trend that will continue : “This is a trend that will continue. Anything that can help brands standout in the cluttered, online space, creates connection, and provides a sense of membership, belonging, community and experience for your audience is a powerful content marketing strategy.” In fact, Kallie has a good example that speaks to the renewed power of print marketing.. [insert Kallie’s example of flyer printing/ mailing] So, not only is print effective once again, but… Print is cheap – for $70 you can print 1,000 postcards; or print flyers in- house; print posters Print is physical and immediate – you don’t even have to spend the money for postage to make good use of flyers; leave behind; handout at events; lobby; put some postcards in your pocket and hand out to people you meet. In this way, print reaches people that email and other marketing strategies can’t reach.
• #17: Often times when we think about marketing events on LinkedIn we only talk about utilizing LinkedIn Company and Group Pages. Something that has the potential to reach more people is bar staff, board members and section chairs personal LinkedIn profiles. Do not be afraid to ask your staff and board members, WHEN APPROPRIATE, to push out information about your events and campaigns on their LinkedIn profiles. I would never suggest you asking a bar staff person to use their personal Facebook page or TWITTER account to send bar related messages out but LinkedIn is different in that it is a professional platform. A lot of the connections you and your staff probably have are from the bar world, whether they are lawyers, law students, legal professionals or legal journalists.  Why not send a bar related message to your LinkedIn connections? And I think asking board members and other staff members to do the same is a great way to expand the reach of your programs and campaigns.
• #19: Taking advantage of Awareness Months/Weeks/Days and Holidays to Compliment Your Marketing Efforts What is an awareness month? Awareness months/days/ weeks are observed every year and used by various governments, groups and organizations to raise awareness of an issue, commemorate a group or event, or celebrate something. At SFBAR we use this in our marketing efforts a lot.  For example, during October, which is Domestic Violence Awareness month, we publish a series of printed and electronic articles on DV and relate them back to our pro bono programs that help survivors of DV. Every article has a call to action urging readers to volunteer with our program or donate to it. An example is Veterans Day – on that day and the week leading up to it we did an entire social media marketing campaign around members who were veterans and posted pictures of them and posted articles we had previously published on Veterans Court in our magazine and related all of these posts back to a Lawyer Referral Service program we have that helps Veterans with legal issues.  Another example is National Volunteer Week. It is during April and for one week we do a social media marketing campaign about section leaders, board members, and probono volunteers etc. We look at this week as a way to market all of the volunteer opportunities we have here at the Bar and our Justice & Diversity Center.  Creating a Giving Tuesday campaign is another great way to promote one of your programs. In 2014, we decided to do our first ever Giving Tuesday campaign to promote our Scholarship program. All our posts included the #GivingTuesday Hashtag and this campaign drove a ton of traffic to the scholarship pages on our website 6. Another way to think about awareness months is to tie them into specific CLEs you are hosting. For example, April is Financial Literacy month. We take this month to push out all of estate our planning cles and financial wellness seminars. 7. I find out all the awareness months/weeks/days and add them to the top of my monthly marketing plan templates which I talked about in a previous slide. I include this so other staff members can start thinking about ways to incorporate the awareness topic into their event/campaign marketing efforts or perhaps even plan an event around that awareness topic and time period. 8. Typically, an awareness month or awareness week has a website associated with it where you can access resources and logos associated with the cause that you can use in your marketing efforts. On the resource handout at the end of the presentation there is a link to these awareness days/weeks/months: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commemorative_months
• #20: Veterans Day example
• #21: #GivingTuesday examples
• #25: With all these different marketing tips and tools, it’s important that you evaluate what you’re doing. Analyzing your marketing outcomes will help you focus on what works and help you eliminate marketing tactics that are just a waste of time. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and blogging platforms like Wordpress have built-in analytics tools you can use. Another great free analytics tool is Google Analytics – and I’ll show you an easy way to use it to evaluate marketing efforts. (next slide) -> See what works best and do more of that
• #26: What we’re looking at here is the Google Analytics page for a specific event page on our website – (you can see the screenshot of the event page in the bottom right corner) The analytics show us how many people visited the event page – and more importantly, where those visitors came from. The second column (the column the orange speech bubble points to) shows the source and medium of your web page traffic. In this case, it shows that Twitter was one of the top three sources of traffic to the site. Our email marketing through Maildog and our blog article about the event also drove traffic to the page – both of those sources are also in the top ten. In this way, you can easily see what works – and then simply do more of that.
• #27: Finally – if you have an event that just isn’t working anymore – consider sunsetting it. Just let it go. If you can’t get people to attend, year after year. Don’t do an event just because you did it last year and the year before. If none of your marketing strategies work, and the event creates marketing and budgeting headaches, just let it go. Or, to reference one of Sayre’s marketing tips from the beginning of this webinar – if you can’t come up with 3 to 5 reasons to attend an event, it might just be a bad event. Don’t do it. Sunset it.