Today is International Marijuana Day, so we’ve been told – a fine time to revisit a favorite piece of lawyer content marketing: “Don’t Eat Your Weed,” a folk song by the Texas-based firm of Hutson & Harris.
Content marketing is such a powerful marketing tool; it can build your reputation, cement your credentials and provide prospects with a sample of your style. It’s also hard to do right, especially in the legal arena: There’s a lot of competition, and there’s a lot of dry subject matter. You’re not likely to differentiate yourself with an article that’s a clone of 74 other Supreme Court updates.
Not all of us are blessed with country music chops or salty subject matter, but “Don’t Eat Your Weed” exemplifies principles of great content marketing that can be applied across the industry. Will Hutson and Chris Harris crafted this fun little earworm of a song around the basic facts that:
- If you are in possession of less than two ounces of marijuana, it’s a class B misdemeanor.
- You can make it significantly harder on yourself if you try to alter, conceal or destroy it; then it becomes a felony.
Why it works:
- It’s helpful. It provides useful, practical knowledge to the firm’s target base of potential criminal defendants. It’s not about the firm at all. It’s not a song about how great Hutson and Harris are. It’s valuable information.
- It’s memorable. Fair warning: This song stays with you for days. Viewers may not remember “Hutson & Harris,” but you can easily imagine someone Googling “Don’t Eat Your Weed” months after watching the video.
- It’s approachable. Hutson and Harris don’t cite a bunch of statutes. They use concise language (“tampering with evidence/ doesn’t make any sense”) and don’t get hung up on jargon.
- It has personality. Social media is social, after all. People share content that is human, engaging and funny. These guys smile and laugh, and they seem to actually like each other and their jobs. It’s winsome.
- It seamlessly provides contact information and a call-to-action. Our troubadours have their phone number and website listed at the bottom of the video; they make it easy to find them. And there’s an elegant lyrical promotion woven in: “It’s just a misdemeanor / you can hire a cleaner / to get it off your record.”
To date, the video has more than 400,000 views. Kudos to this firm for trying something new, putting in the work to make it work, and above all, making “there’s a kind of probation / called deferred adjudication” so catchy.
(Note: This is not a Firesign client; we don’t know these guys, but we’d like to.)