Case Study: Integrated brand awareness campaign for startup law firm
Our client was a startup immigration law firm with aggressive growth goals, and no prior PR experience. Online equity was low, with less than 300 monthly web visitors and no social engagement. The firm’s 3 attorneys specialize in immigration law that impacts corporate, higher ed, healthcare and STEM employers, and were focused on reaching new prospects nationally.
A top priority was growing brand awareness on a national scale. This included building credibility in front of prospects, including HR directors, In-house Counsel and C-level executives who hire foreign talent. Focus was placed on increasing web traffic by at least 10% monthly, and helping the brand get discovered online for topics of interest to their audience, including J-1, EB-1 and H-1B visa programs.
Fluent built a paid/earned/owned campaign that integrated all channels to increase awareness of the law firm’s services and generate business development leads. We focused our campaign on leveraging their inventory of owned content (webinars and blog posts) to power an annual multi-channel campaign. First, we built a quarterly editorial calendar that aligned the firm’s core services with the interests and research/buying cycle of their audience, including J-1 visas, EB-1 visas, H-1B visas and I-9 compliance. For each theme, we created long-form content, including the writing and design of educational guides with landing pages and submission forms, along with related blog posts for the firm’s website.
Using LinkedIn Sponsored Content (targeting HR and legal professionals) and Google Display Ads placed on key industry websites, we promoted the content with a modest ad budget of $600/quarter. Fluent’s PR team was pitching and securing earned media placements on the same quarterly themes, targeting local, regional and trade media. At the same time, we created an email automation program to nurture the leads collected through paid channels.
We saw exponential growth in the firm’s online audience. The paid channels resulted in 71k LinkedIn sponsored impressions and 300+ clicks to long-form content and 100+ new leads to fuel the email nurturing effort. Our Google display and remarketing ads also bumped web traffic. Monthly web visitors jumped by 293% over the course of 12 months, far exceeding the goal of a 120% annual increase. Our PPC ad budget was modest at $600/month.
Almost 50% of monthly web traffic is organic, driven primarily by J-1 visa and EB-1 visa keyword searches. These organic metrics suggest that the firm is earning not only authority by Google, but an online audience spanning higher education, healthcare and highly-trained foreign professionals.
We met our goal of 1 new monthly editorial placement and formed relationships with editors at Forbes, SRHM, Portland Press Herald, and Mainebiz, as well as others. The overall campaign metrics include online readership of 134M, coverage views of 106k and 1.84K social shares.