Case Study: Smith Currie Oles – National Law Firm

Integrated Marketing Strategy and Service:

Faced with macro-competitive marketing challenges coupled with the need to unify messaging across all of their regional offices for consistent micro-market effect and dual-purposed national reputation management, leading law firm Smith Currie Oles turned to Eberly & Collard Public Relations for a KPI-focused approach to branding victory.

While Smith Currie literally wrote the book on Construction Law and Government Contract Law, a known challenge was the fact that cognizance about their attorneys’ authorship was lacking. A juxtaposition existed between the law firm’s high-level expertise and the Construction Industry’s full-fledged awareness of it, creating an uphill marketing climb for the law firm’s personnel and partners.

Added to the marketing mix was the firm’s acquisition of, and unification with, one of its top competitors, making national law firm marketing communications much more complex, yet critically essential.

They searched quite some time, seeking experts in SEO marketing for law firms, consultants with experience in public relations for law firms, and specialists with renowned backgrounds in managing inbound marketing for law firms.

Having earned numerous “best law firm marketing” accolades and honors, Eberly & Collard Public Relations was selected as Smith Currie Oles’ agency of record.

Right away, our law firm marketing agency team sprang into action by conducting our proprietary, comprehensive Research and Discovery process.

This was one of the first opportunities for the Smith Currie Oles personnel, partners and internal marketing committee to participate in a full evaluation of the ways in which the firm conveyed key messages to its constituencies. We also steered the process to explore current and potential brand perceptions of the law firm and its services on the parts of their diverse clients, industry associations, media members and other essential publics.

With decades of experience conceptualizing and managing marketing for attorneys and law firms, we crafted an intentional toolkit of on-point creative and strategy focused on acute and integrated marketing service elements.

This included defining, conceptualizing, communicating and managing a series of company news, thought-leadership content, and unique selling propositions for Smith Currie Oles. Our team concentrated on promoting and publicizing the law firm’s nationwide B-to-B industry presence, practice areas, service offerings and personnel through consultation in terms of digital marketing, traditional media relations and overall marketing communications.

How we got there:

Fundamental Strategy comprised maximizing and expanding the marketing accomplishments previously achieved by the law firm’s internal staff members to grow a more-competitive national brand presence for Smith Currie, specifically within and among the United States Commercial Construction Industry and as a leading Government Contracts legal services firm. With years of experience overseeing marketing for law firms, we set to work developing strategic advertising campaigns, digital marketing programs, social media concepts, public relations activations, media relations campaigns, and thought-leadership content to extensively communicate our client’s 100-years of highly productive legal and law services.

This also included a top-to-bottom Marketing Communications strategy for all internal and external audiences to announce and maintain critical and clear messaging about the law firm’s acquisition of and unification with a long-standing competitive law firm, making the newly formed larger firm the leading group of national attorneys in various U.S. sectors.

Acquisition and unification communication plans were created and managed by Eberly & Collard Public Relations based upon the company’s core values and updated mission to positively convey key messages to and engage with their employees, partners, stakeholders, prospects, clients, media outlets, industry associations, the American Bar Association, various states’ bar associations, and other integral groups.

Annual Public Relations, Digital Marketing and Branding:

Program Plan: Executed campaigns, projects, activities, consultation and reporting to produce PR-focused connections, brand awareness and publicity for Smith Currie Oles.

Strategy: Conceptualized and implemented strategies for messaging to support brand evolution and thought-leadership publicity for law firm’s national presence and each of their offices’ Designated Market Areas and regions.

Public Relations and Digital Campaigns: Developed, organized, coordinated and reported monthly publicity campaigns and weekly/monthly digital campaigns and programs, including all communication platforms such as print and digital media placements, speaking and panel acquisitions for the law partners, ongoing email campaigns, CRM consultation, Search Engine Optimization, on- and off-page SEO tactics, Buyer Personas, Keyword Gap Reports, and more.

Acquisition and Reputation Communications: Evaluated, conceptualized, developed and oversaw acquisition communications when the half-century legal services firm acquired one of its top law firm competitors. This involved branding and messaging creation, distribution and deployment of related information, and external public and media relations as well as reputation management consultation in terms of communications to existing and new personnel, partners, stakeholders and the trade and mainstream business media.

PR-based Thought-leadership Messaging: Secured and facilitated publishable articles, on-air podcasts and other media outlet interviews to position the law firm’s partners as topic experts and thought-leaders on a monthly basis.

Press Release Messaging: Wrote/secured publication of Associated Press-style press release and media pitches to publicize firm news and attorney expertise through law firm content marketing.

Media Relations: Conducted outreach to strategic trade and mainstream media members to pitch or persuade them to publish content that generated brand awareness and positive editorial coverage and publicity for Smith Currie Oles.

Digital Marketing: Consulted and managed key components of Smith Currie’s Search Engine Optimization, Google Search Rankings, keyword phrases development, Meta-descriptions for website, Share of Voice assessments, Google Business Profile pages, & online visibility/presence. ECPR also taught Google Analytics training to select members of the legal firm’s personnel.

Search Engine Optimization: Eberly & Collard Public Relations updated and managed an evolving list of SEO Search Keywords. Activity and results reports included Keyword Gap Reports that compared the law firm against the firm’s top competitors, Google Analytics Top Landing Pages from Website Driving traffic for Smith Currie Oles, SEO Keyword Position Tracking Reports and Focus Keyword Lists.

Digital Campaigns Training: Provided training sessions about utilizing firm’s existing website tools that included the Yoast SEO plug-in to explain how to edit and optimize website page meta-descriptions and internal link-building for further optimization.

Digital Advertising: Consulted and managed research, educational training and implementation for Smith Currie’s LinkedIn advertising campaigns; also provided consultation for Google Ads based upon the key digital marketing strategy for law firms.

Google Business Profiles: Corrected numerous existing Google Business Profiles that had misinformation or were duplicates for most of the law firm’s offices. Developed, added and secured approval from Google for multiple new Google Business Profiles for newly launched and acquired office locations.

Google Ads and Google Screened Consultation: Recommended custom solutions for Google’s paid professionally certified screening process; secured groundwork for Google denoting the certification in the search page at the top of the screen for law firm. Boosted Smith Currie Oles to the top of the search results page with enhanced Local Service Ads to achieve maximum visibility while gaining quality leads.

Branding/Public Relations: Conceptualized and developed numerous branding campaigns to induce new growth for the firm’s brand awareness on the parts of targeted Construction-related audiences, essential industry associations, and targeted city/regional/national professional groups.

LinkedIn Advertising: Managed paid campaigns for individual offices and national law firm presence. One key campaign quickly garnered a reach of 38,989 with total impressions at 82,973 LinkedIn members. Equating to just over 1¢ per impression which was/is optimum.

Podcast and Video Consultation: Secured external association and media podcast guest spots for attorneys with relevant business audiences. Guided self-produced podcasts plan, including introduction to the necessary equipment, recording software and internet-based recording products; vetting streaming service providers; hosting platforms and sites; RSS Feed URLs; vanity podcast URLs; an iTunes account for Apple Podcast Inclusion; and general podcast planning. Also supplied insights for polishing self-produced videos, including tips for scripting, blocking, body language, voice inflections, video editing advice, etc.

Social Media Consultation: Cross-promoted specific events and alliances for attorneys with the applicable industry associations across both the firm’s and associations’ social media channels. Generated monthly post drafts or other requested content for social media channels, with objectives of revising text or tone, improving audience engagement tactics such as messaging strategies, images, etc.

Brochure Planning/Copywriting: Reviewed options for updating firm’s digital brochures to include copy writing suggestions to refresh prior narratives; new imagery, sections and subpages; and collaboration through brochure creation phases. Supplied branding ideation/suggestions versus firm’s undesired more-sales-oriented branding copy in terms of select attorney’s events and seminars to further evoke industry and sector perceptions about/for the firm and its numerous offices.

Individual, Regional Offices’ Marketing: Provided creative, digital marketing, graphic design ideas, integrated marketing service support, and general brand consultation for select, individual Smith Currie Oles’ personnel and offices around the country.

Notable Media Coverage

The Results:

  • Performed ongoing Competitive Keyword Gap Reports and overall Short- and Long-tail Keyword Phrase Analysis to grow search ranking status by 43%.
  • Incorporated 500+ SEO Keywords into Smith Currie Oles’ organic written content, website copy, online updates, and blog.
  • Researched and acquired 228 new, high-authoritative backlinks through media relations campaigns and digital marketing that enabled a 65% increase in website page rankings for the law firm.
  • Produced 25 new forms of on-page and 157 new off-page Search Engine Optimized content strategies.
  • Developed 37% more online narrative content that utilized lead and prospect “search intent” as a central pillar for lead generation and Search Engine Keyword ranking optimization.
  • Grew Earned Media (editorial) placements of published press releases, bylined articles, Q&As and through-leadership interviews by 118% in year 1, doubled published editorial in year 2, and tripled media coverage in the successive timeframe.
  • Corrected, verified and enhanced 9 national law offices’ Google Business Profile listings, achieving 100% accuracy and acceptance by Google.
  • Vetted, garnered and helped plan 36 new speaking and panel opportunities for Smith Currie Oles’ attorneys and partners per best practices in public relations for law firms.
  • Onboarded brand new self-produced podcast studio guidance, recording equipment, 5 streaming platforms, scripting, and editing support for 10 law offices and 8 core law firm partners.
  • Intensified external communications by 81%, new impressions by 207% and Lead Generation by 42%.