By Kathryn Tilmes
Summer is quickly approaching, which means that many students who are enrolled in law school and business school are looking for a way to develop their professional growth through internships.
At GNGF, we utilize the local university’s co-op program, which allows us to have marketing students as a part of our team year round. We have found that having students on staff is mutually beneficial to our interns and to our team. It allows us to have a fresh perspective on our processes. Sometimes our best ideas happen because an intern asks a question that has never been asked before. This is just one reason why we highly recommend hiring a college or law school student intern at your firm this summer.
Perhaps you’ve never thought about hiring an intern for the summer, or you’re hesitant because you’re not sure what work you would give him or her.
If you’re wary about hiring an intern, think about the tasks or special projects that you’ve been hoping to tackle for months, but can’t seem to find the time to start. If we had to guess, a lot of those projects are likely related to marketing your firm.
And depending on the level of expertise required, it is very possible that a student can help you with these projects.
Here are 3 projects for a 12-week long summer internship that can help improve the marketing efforts of your firm.
1. eNewsletter Creation and Management
We’ve worked with a client who hired a summer intern, and one of his main roles was to create newsletter content for the firm and ensure that it was sent on a monthly basis.
This is a great idea for an intern, especially if he or she is skilled in content creation. Our team worked with the intern to set up the design of the newsletter and instructed him on how to use MailChimp, and then gave him control, providing feedback along the way.
eNewsletters can increase brand awareness, referral traffic to your website, and general online engagement.
2. Local Accident Updates
If you’re a personal injury attorney, a great way to increase the amount of target keywords on your website is to update your blog on a regular basis (we suggest a minimum of 3 times per week) with local updates highlighting the vehicular accidents that occurred within the region in which your firm is located. Last summer, we worked with a client who hired a summer intern on this project and it turned out to be very successful. Our team gave the intern access to the website in order to publish a new post every day and we gave her guidelines on how to write the updates and what to include. Local accident updates can increase target keywords on your website in order to rank higher for related searches.
3. Proactive AVVO Profile Engagement
We highly suggest having an intern update each attorney’s AVVO profile because it can directly improve the branding of your firm online. There are many ways to improve an AVVO profile including ensuring information is up-to-date, all fields are as completed as possible, uploading relevant FAQ videos, adding answers to legal questions (since the answer is connected to your name, you should answer the questions, send them to the intern, and have the intern post to AVVO), and uploading legal guides to the directory site. With AVVO becoming increasingly popular for potential
client searches, your branded presence is very important.
If you are interested in hiring a summer intern and want to have him or her assisting in your marketing efforts, contact your Account Manager today for more information on how we can help assist your intern in these projects.
We are more than happy to provide assistance, whether that is by reviewing their work, creating the project plan for them to follow, or brainstorming more ideas specific to your firm’s needs.