Day in the life of
Marketing Specialist – Riley Northup
I work as a Marketing Specialist for a law firm in Oakland, California. Like a lot of employees in the Marketing field, I have the opportunity to work remotely. Fortunately for me, my employer provided me with everything I need to work efficiently while working remotely.
Work from home setup
A typical day of work starts with me looking over how many individuals contacted our law firm and how many of them hired one of our attorneys. I always have to look at the data before I can begin my day to get a baseline of the health of the law firm’s marketing initiatives. Once I get an idea of how our marketing is performing, I begin going through my daily newsletters. This is perhaps my biggest tip to anybody in the marketing world. Subscribe to newsletters and read them daily. This lets me know about any changes going on in the marketing world and allows me to stay up-to-date on all trends. What I do next often depends on what projects I am working on. Sometimes I follow that up by going on Hootsuite and go through our social media and planning posts for the day.
Social media planning on Hootsuite
I also use this time to respond to any messages we received overnight and reply to any reviews we received online as well. Other days I use this time to check our website and make sure everything is running as planned.
Typically, I will have some form of a blog to review for the upcoming days. So, I grab a coffee and begin editing the legal blogs. If I have any questions, I can work with an attorney on our team to ensure the blog is legally accurate. This is often the case as the blogs are legal in nature, so this provides a good opportunity to brush up on my legal knowledge.
Often the last thing I do before lunch is put together a report of some sort. Reports can come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but usually, they are aimed at measuring the effectiveness of a marketing campaign we are running. For example, if I was reporting on the success of running advertisements on a legal directory like Avvo, I would take time to look at every person who contacted us from Avvo. I would further break that down to how many were qualified leads and how many hired an attorney on our team. With these numbers in mind, I can begin looking at the effectiveness of our marketing by figuring out our ROI (return on investment). This usually leads me into lunch, which I can take at nearly any time as there are no strict work hours since the position doesn’t directly interact with customers. The graphic below shows an example of a report I did relating to the effectiveness of a marketing campaign broken down into different counties.
Example of marketing ROI report
This usually leads me into lunch, which I can take at nearly any time as there are no strict work hours since the position doesn’t directly interact with customers.
Most days, I will have a meeting with either our website manager or another vendor. In this meeting, we often go over our website tactics, look at how the performance has been over the past few months, and determine our course of action moving forward. For example, if I was meeting with our website manager, we would look at Google Search Console to go over how our site is performing in organic search.
Google Search Console
Depending on the day, I could also have meetings with attorneys from other law firms or other local business owners to network and possibly create referral relationships to drive business. Then, depending on the day, I could begin researching potential legal topics for FAQ videos. For example, I could be looking into doing a video on how certain criminal charges can impact your Second Amendment rights. So, I begin researching the relevant Penal Codes and putting together an outline for the video. I also will consult with the attorneys during this process and work to ensure the legal accuracy of the outline.
And last but not least, I reach out to satisfied clients to see if they are willing to give us a review and generally ask how satisfied they were with our legal team. While this covers a lot of things, a person in the marketing field will likely have ever-changing tasks and projects, so every day brings a different challenge, which is probably the best thing about my job.
Pros
The pros of my job are I am always learning something new. Some fields remain relatively the same as you continue to work in them. In marketing, you should welcome change and be accustomed to it. Marketing tactics are always shifting, and the legal marketing field gives me the opportunity to learn something new every day.
The opportunity to learn more about the legal field is also another great bonus of my position in legal marketing. I have always been interested in the legal side of things, so I love the opportunity to learn more about laws and courts through my job.
Cons
The cons are similar. Since the field is always evolving, you must be ready to learn daily. Failure to proactively stay up-to-date on marketing trends and best practices can be detrimental to your career. My advice for anybody looking to get into the legal marketing field would be to subscribe to relevant, daily newsletters to ensure you are staying up-to-date on all the trends in the marketing world.
Another con is you may have to attend events on weekends or after hours. I typically have to spend some weekends or after work hours attending events for marketing purposes.
