1. Feed your legal team digestible bites
It's easy to get caught up in marketing jargon, metrics and all of the other marketing language that we live with everyday. After all, we make our living generating business out of thin air with our printed, visual or audio words. Taking a step back and remembering that the world doesn't revolve around us and our industry (at least not all of the time) is a tough but necessary step to begin properly educating everyone else around us. This thought process holds true whether we're talking about educating your legal department, sales teams or CEO. Break down the interactive marketing space, as well as marketing in general, and start to demystify what you take for granted every day.
I'm fortunate to have a wife who is not in the marketing world. She is an elementary school teacher. It used to frustrate me when I'd talk to her about my day and the new projects I was working on, and I'd just get a blank or confused look in return. It wasn't until I laid the groundwork and gave her plenty of background information that she started to understand the logic and reasoning that went behind my marketing initiatives. Then I started using the exact same approach in-house with each and every department, and it's a tactic I continue to use every day across our entire organization.
What we do is fun and interesting, but it's like a foreign country to your legal team if they haven't been exposed to the marketing world. Start with some basic concepts and reading material, and make it a habit to trickle industry trends, case studies and initiatives from other companies both inside and outside of your vertical. I recommend that your legal team read "The Online Advertising Playbook," iMedia Connection and the IAB's SmartBrief.
