Professional Services

Marketing - Product Launch

Situation

Atlanta-based law firm Smith, Gambrell & Russell evaluated its marketing efforts and found that the company was developing more than 17 different newsletters each year. While the newsletters proved beneficial to the firm's individual specialty practice areas, they did not cross-sell the firm's services to current and potential clients, and they were cost and time prohibitive to produce.

Challenge

The firm decided to consolidate the newsletters into one custom published magazine. The magazine replaced the previous newsletters to great effect - allowing many of the firm's attorneys to provide advice and expertise in an easy to understand format. With the launch of Trust the LEADERS, Smith, Gambrell & Russell wanted to obtain publicity on the firm's visionary approach to marketing, as well as re-purpose the attorney-written articles for use by other publications as by-lines.

c21 Solution

c21 devised a strategy to pitch the magazine in two ways. First, we developed a pitch on the concept of the magazine to legal and marketing publications, and second, we pitched the author attorneys as experts to publications reaching the firm's vertical markets. The LEADERS press kit was developed with this two-pronged strategy in mind - drafting components on the launch of the magazine, the firm's background, and bios on each attorney and their area of expertise relevant to each vertical market. After drafting pitch letters cto each audience, we distributed more than 100 press kits and conducted extensive follow-up. To the verticals, we offered both the attorney-written article as a by-line, and the attorney as a resource for future stories featuring legal issues.

Results

Within one month of distributing the LEADERS press kit and magazine, more than eight articles were published, including two that were the first in a yearlong series of articles requested. In addition, c21 was retained to promote subsequent issues of Trust the LEADERS.