“ Melissa’s revenue increased by 17% — and based on work in progress and AR, she is projected to see significant growth again this year.”
Kathryn Whitaker, Director of Marketing and Business Development, McNair
In early 2016 attorney Melissa Azallion, a shareholder at South Carolina-based McNair Law Firm, approached Kathryn Whitaker, the firm’s director of marketing and business development, with an idea: “I’d like to start a blog for my immigration practice.” Melissa was an adept networker but thus far had not included writing in her marketing wheelhouse.
Kathryn used JD Supra to immediately reach a large, national audience for Melissa’s writing — and enable her to develop a strategy for the blog and measure tangible results.
Says Kathryn: “McNair had just engaged with JD Supra to bring visibility to our client alerts and blog content. I knew it would take some time to get a blog up and running, so I told Melissa we would publish her first immigration pieces on JD Supra and on the firm site as alerts.”
“I thought this would solve a few problems, not least of which is readership: with the depth of JD Supra’s subscriber base, we’d be able to put Melissa’s writing in front of an audience right away. Immigration is a federal practice, and she wanted to increase her visibility on a national level. We were able to do so largely because of JD Supra.”
JD Supra’s large reader base also enabled Kathryn and Melissa to gain valuable insights for the blog: “Our JD Supra analytics told us which of Melissa’s pieces resonated most with the right audience. Then, we used our JD Supra reader information to launch Melissa’s blog with a long-term, strategic focus on the proven needs of our target readers. JD Supra gave us readers and evidence.”
For example, “from our JD Supra analytics we learned that if we want to reach a specific industry or sector, write about it. Being on JD Supra early in the writing enabled us to
Melissa wanted to increase her visibility on a national level, and we were able to do so largely because of JD Supra.
learn how this works. Melissa wrote about a specific immigration issue to do with foreign physicians and how this impacts the healthcare space. That post, with its specific attention to healthcare, became one of our most popular. We repeated what we learned when we launched the blog, by targeting other specific industries with our posts, and they are always the most popular.”
Kathryn wanted more than insights; she also saw the initiative as an opportunity to measure marketing and business development ROI from writing efforts.
As Melissa incorporated a new marketing activity into her workday — writing on immigration issues — the savvy McNair marketing team took measure of her speaking opportunities, media mentions, and other such visibility benchmarks up until that point.
Would writing make a difference to practice growth? The team didn’t need a blog to begin answering the question.
For our firm, JD Supra signifies not just visibility, but visibility and opportunity.
“The marketing team gave me some great metrics to prove my efforts were paying off. Before I started writing, I was invited to speak about once a quarter. I saw a 300% increase in invitations and now speak to industry groups once a month. Not only that, I now use content to my advantage when networking. In my follow-up, I send articles to people I met in person at my speaking gigs. Just the other day, I sent an article to an executive I’d recently met after a presentation, and she replied by inviting me to come speak in a new market for me, meaning: a new audience and new opportunities,” said Melissa.
More significantly, in the first year after she started to publish content, Kathryn reports “Melissa’s revenue increased by 17% — and based on work in progress and AR, she is projected to see significant growth again this year. The only new marketing activity she engaged in during this time: writing.”
In May 2017, after a year of writing on immigration matters on JD Supra and seeing results, Kathryn, Melissa, and the McNair Law Firm launched the Immigration Law Insights blog at www.mcnairimmigrationblog.com. JD Supra continues to bring additional visibility to Melissa’s blog posts and, for their part, Melissa and the marketing team continue to use JD Supra analytics to derive insights and identify opportunities.
Says Kathryn: “We especially love being able to see the readers in specific companies and industries via our JD Supra metrics. It helps us know where we are reaching the most meaningful audience. In fact, we are now building on this in our ongoing work with JD Supra and are starting to use Beacon Reports for even deeper industry insights, not just for Melissa but also other attorneys and practice groups in the firm. For our firm, JD Supra signifies not just visibility, but visibility and opportunity.”
