Niche Content Marketing: Twitter Chat with @LindsayGriffith #VCBuzz

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Niche Content Marketing: Twitter Chat with @LindsayGriffith #VCBuzzContent and social media marketing can be different from niche and niche but there are no boring niches where content and relationship building are impossible. We’ll prove this point today!

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About Lindsay

Lindsay Griffiths is marketing and business development executive with experience in branding and identity development.

Lindsay shares her marketing insights at her blog Zen & the Art of Legal Networking

Connect to Lindsay on Linkedin!

Questions we discussed

Q1 I was very impressed with the cartoon campaign you mention on your About page. Could you describe how you come up with ideas and marketing strategy for niche marketing campaign?

Staying open minded and talking with a lot of really smart people has been a great help. I’ve built strong relationships with legal marketers & had interesting conversations that lead to the germ of a thought that becomes something we develop into a full-blown marketing campaign.

I try not to limit myself to the legal industry though, because we can often end up recycling ideas. I’ll look to what other industries are doing, even if it doesn’t seem like it would work & try to figure out how to apply it. We’re a not-for-profit, so I have to be very creative in our marketing campaigns & that’s forced me to think outside the box.

Sure! Our cartoon project is actually a perfect example – I talk a little here and would be happy to go into more detail about it!

Thank you! It was one of my all-time favorite projects. I had so much fun doing it.

Q2 How is relationship building within the law niche different from the generic online business relationship building? Which platforms are best to connect to fellow lawyers or to the clients? Are there any niche-specific networks?

It’s not much different, though lawyers would like to think that it is! But it quickly became obvious that no one wanted one more place that they had to go to in order to engage.

People want to engage where they already are. That being said, lawyers are most comfortable on LinkedIn. In terms of where their clients are, it’s specific by industry, and depends on what the clients do. Some of them aren’t using social media at all, while others are incredibly savvy, and can be found anywhere and everywhere.

I advise my lawyers to find out where their clients are, how they like to receive information, and to meet them in those places. I do see more lawyers on FB & Twitter though it’s still not somewhere lawyers feel comfortable going for business development.

There are fewer niche-specific networks, and more groups within existing platforms that are niche-specific. For ex: you might belong to a specialty LinkedIn group that is vibrant, active & engaged, but it’s still part of LinkedIn.

But some do exist – the Legal Marketing Association has its own platform for engagement built into its website. But it’s an uphill battle to get people to leave FaceBook, where they’re already hanging out, to go to a different platform to engage.

It’s tough. Sometimes, you’ve just got to embrace FaceBook ?

Good question! It depends on how well they’re moderated. My faves are Legal Blogging the Legal Marketing Association (though that’s members’ only). In terms of changes, I’d say that LI in general has become more promotional, less collaborative, which makes it more challenging. You’ve really got to moderate aggressively to have a good group & contribute more than just your own stuff.

That’s so true RE core audience. You really have to know your industry VERY well.

Look to JDSupra – they have amazingly good content, and work hard to curate the good stuff out there. Depends on niche.

Q3 You shared a few ways to find content inspiration. Could you elaborate? What’s your brainstorming process? What helps?

I always start with my editorial calendar, which I review & populate quarterly. It has general areas that I want to cover in my blog, such as networking, social media & content marketing. Each quarter I review it to see what’s working & schedule the next quarter. On a weekly basis, I’ll look to see what broad areas I have given myself for that following week.

Once I’m ready to write a post, if I don’t already have something in mind based on conversations that I’ve been having with colleagues in legal marketing, with my lawyer clients, or from email questions I’ve gotten I’ll go to a couple of websites for inspiration, starting usually with contentmarketinginstitute.com and Klout. Klout can be hit or miss, but sometimes I’ll find something valuable in there.

I also go to Twitter and look at the columns I have set up, or do a search for the keyword that I’m focused on.

RSS readers can be a great way to manage this too. Once I know what direction I want to go in, I’ll start writing.

Well…admittedly, I haven’t been using it much. But when I do, I use Feedly. It’s been downhill the last few years since some of the good ones went away.

Q4 You do a lot of content round-ups on your blog: How do you monitor niche content to create those?

The content round-ups on my blog are sourced entirely from our member firms, and come from our website. We build that content throughout the week, by having RSS feeds coming directly from member firm sites to our site.

We also take content that is emailed to us, either by subscription or directly, and monitor the social postings of our members. At the end of the week, I review the content & offer a diverse look at the legal news from around the globe, from our members.

No, I’m not that organized for that either. I review the full content for the week & pick faves.

Q5 What are your favorite social media networks and how do you leverage them for niche marketing?

My favorite social media network at the moment is Instagram. (I just love it.)

We don’t have a large audience there, so it’s not somewhere I focus a lot of our resources. For people that do want to expend some effort there, it’s great because it’s growing so quickly.

For B2B organizations like ours, I find that using it to show a more human side to our company can be really effective.

Posting photos of fun things that we do at our conferences, Throwback Thursday shots, video interviews with our lawyers behind the scenes types of photos, “Where in the World Are We?” etc. is a way to build relationships with our audience.

Otherwise, we primarily use LinkedIn and Twitter. We post valuable, substantive content there that we believe will resonate with our audience. Based on our experience, and the data that we track, and we then engage with the connections that we have in those spaces.

That part is difficult since they don’t really easily allow links out (other than profiles). But there is the option to put whatever the link is that you want in your profile and encourage people to use that. The other option is to have an easily memorable shortened link that people can use. More work, but a possibility.

Our previous content marketing Twitter chats:

 

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