John McDougall Interviewed by the LexBlog Network at LMA, Orlando

Colin O’Keefe of LXBN TV interviews John McDougall of the Legal Marketing Review at the 2014 Legal Marketing Association’s Annual Conference and discusses current trends in the legal marketing industry, and ways in which law firms can gain credibility and authority through content marketing.

Colin O’Keefe: This is Colin O’Keefe for LXBN TV here at the 2014 Legal Marketing Association’s Annual Conference.  I am joined now by John McDougall of McDougall Interactive Advertising, and also author of this book Web Marketing on All Cylinders, and the blog the “Legal Marketing Review.”  John we were just speaking off-air about two subjects.  Starting with the first one, a big theme here at this conference and many others in this realm is content marketing and how big that has become.  What are your thoughts on the biggest trends there and themes and the best things that law firms and marketers should do?

John McDougall:  Well I think it’s important that if you have content, you are more of an authority.  So if you are an author of a book.  An author is the second most important job outside of brain surgeon.   So being an author is definitely respected.  So people that are blogging, and adding value as attorneys to both their blogs, and on LinkedIn, and sharing good content is definitely a key theme moving forward.

Colin O’Keefe:  Definitely. Then the second thing that you talked about, and it’s something that we have seen, I guess fall out of favor a little bit and that’s paid search marketing for lawyers.  Of course, it’s more applicable in some areas.  What are your thoughts on what’s happening with paid search marketing for lawyers?

John McDougall:  Well I find it interesting that both last year at the LMA Vegas, which was awesome, and this year at LMA Orlando, there’s not a lot of talk around paid search.  I’m definitely more of a fan of content marketing, and have been doing SEO since 1995.  So I love the idea of authority and content as thought leadership.  At the same time, paid search gives you a quick way, especially if you want to just dial in very specific keywords, and say your geographic region, in a specific town, around very specific practice areas, you can have ads showing up right away instantly.  Again, when you target them to specific geographic locations, you can get a really good value.  So I think it’s worth noting that that’s another tactic that’s worth looking at.

Colin O’Keefe:  Absolutely.  One thing I noticed recently is that Google switched up its design with the paid search ads.   It’s a little… You can’t tell quite as easily that it’s paid search.  So that’s going to be interesting to watch to see how that shakes out.  Once again, that is John McDougall of McDougall Interactive Marketing. For more on our video interviews from this conference, be sure to visit us at LXBN.com/LMA.  Thanks John.

John McDougall:  Thank you.