During the Covid 19 crises many people have been thought about making changes. They are spent a lot of time analyzing where they are, how they got there and what they can do to effect change in the future. Often a crisis serves as a wake up call. Most people are living day to day not really thinking about why they are busy and whether they could or should be doing something else.
I did a lot of reflection a few years ago after my parents passed away and realized that I did not enjoy practicing law and while I didn’t hate everything about it, I just didn’t like it enough to want to keep doing it for the rest of my life. They had encouraged me to pursue a legal career instead of my true calling of marketing and communications. There were aspects of it that I really enjoyed. In fact, when I initially started the firm I learned everything I could about SEO, email marketing and social media in order to efficiently market the firm.
The best part of my former career as a lawyer was the time spent teaching other lawyers how to use marketing and technology to improve their practices, both getting the clients and how to get the work done and keep it secure.
When I was in college, I sold display advertising for the college newspaper and had experience coming up with ad campaigns and the strategy that went into them. I remember there was a photography store in my territory that had not advertised with the paper in years. I spoke with the owner about advertising with the paper and he told me “I hate the college paper! I took out a full-page ad and didn’t get any business from it at all.” I explained to him that a small shop like his would do better taking out a small ad more frequently with a theme that was very noticeable. I explained that his potential customers may not have seen the paper that day or that the ad may not have been strategically designed. He described his ideal customer as someone who knows photography and is very particular about their equipment. The store was named F-Stop. I pitched him on the idea of taking out a small ad, with the term F-Stop and the telephone number - he also wanted to include classes and darkroom but it was still a very small simple ad. We ran the ad 4 weeks in a row. After the second week, he called me and told me that he had more business than he thought possible. The strategy worked, the term wouldn’t mean anything to most people but it caught the eye of the photographers and because the store owner was willing to commit to a series of ads he got the exposure he was looking for (pun intended!)
When I really thought about the aspects of running a law firm and which parts I liked most I realized that I loved selecting new technology and software for my law firm and I really enjoyed the marketing of the firm and our services. I also enjoyed sharing that knowledge with others and empowering them to take their marketing to the next level.
Ultimately I took a role at a B2B marketing agency in Seattle whose clients were all large tech companies. While there I added the concept of demand generation campaigns to my marketing knowledge and learned a lot about how the agency was run. Now I can bring a lot of value in that my experience spans from the smallest businesses all the way to some of the largest publicly traded companies and I can use that to help most anyone who is open to it.
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