”As a partner with Mayo Wynne Baxter, I am so pleased with what Midnight has done for us in such a short space of time. As we grow, being part of the Ampa Group, I look forward to Midnight making sure everyone knows about it.
Martin WilliamsPartner, Mayo Wynne Baxter
The challenge
How Midnight used Mayo Wynne Baxter’s merger with Ampa as a springboard to raise the legal brand’s profile at every level
Excellent communication is about delivering clarity about your business to your existing clients and the wider market. Staying ahead of the news cycle and controlling the narrative is critical to avoid a news vacuum that could be filled with misinformation. This is particularly important when a business is acquired or merges with another company.
If there’s ever a scent of dissatisfaction, drama or the potential for a negative news story to pique the interest of readers and viewers, you can bet somehow someone will jump on it. Unless we’re on your team.
One of the South’s most high-profile law firms, Mayo Wynne Baxter, wanted more than a safe pair of hands. The firm initially appointed us to work on the announcement they were merging with Ampa, a national group of legal and professional service brands.
Yes, we’d bring our decades of experience knowing how to release the story in the right way, but the firm wanted more. Now part of a much broader national brand, Mayo Wynne Baxter understood the value of positioning their brand prominently within the organisation, and to do this, trusting our team to develop fresh, new messaging that would support a clear identity.
Beyond the news of the merger, the law firm wanted to shift its focus on establishing its expertise in employment and family law and raise awareness of its brand in existing and new locations.
How Midnight met the challenge
Right from the start, we worked closely with Ampa’s in-house PR and marketing team to understand the details of the merger to avoid any misunderstandings and develop a comprehensive communication strategy to deliver a unified message at every level, within the business, among its client base and to the legal market at large.
The firm was embarking on a hiring journey, supporting the narrative of a legal brand in the ascendancy. So our strategy delivered regular updates and press announcements to the local, regional and legal trade press, including new hires, business updates, community activities and client deals. And when you’re looking to hire the best talent in your sector, it certainly helps to look like an employer on the up.
With the positioning and messaging strategy rolling, Mayo Wynne Baxter pushed the campaign forward into the next phase with Midnight to raise awareness and elevate the brand with a multi-layered regional and national PR campaign.
As with every client at the start of the relationship, we identified the top-tier media targets to support the client’s business objectives. In Mayo Wynne Baxter’s case, our strategy was to position the law firm with its finger on the pulse of current issues.
Exceeding every expectation for coverage and “newsjacking” for fun
What we love doing for our clients, and what we’ve built a reputation for being incredibly good at, is the art of “newsjacking” – identifying opportunities to comment on relevant breaking news stories and appear in top-tier and national press. With Mayo Wynne Baxter’s employment law specialism, we tapped into a rich vein of opportunity.
We placed comments and contributions attributed to Mayo Wynne Baxter in the national press on the subjects of P&O’s mass redundancies, ongoing strike action, bullying in government departments and the employment lawyer’s gift of Partygate and its fallout.
Our activity further supported national coverage by reaching out to trade sector titles in HR and employment and securing profile pieces in heavyweight business titles and legal publications, such as the Law Society Gazette.
Overall, our campaign with Mayo Wynne Baxter exceeded expectations in both volume and quality of coverage, with more than 200 items of coverage in our first year with a potential reach of 250 million. Mayo Wynne Baxter stepped up nationally as we secured coverage in the Mirror, iNews, Express, Yahoo! and Sky News. And our strategy to position the firm’s sector expertise nationally and locally saw regular coverage in HR and employment trade publications, including People Management, Personnel Today and HR Magazine, as well as frequent coverage in the regional press in the locations of its offices. For our targeted audiences, it really did feel like Mayo Wynne Baxter was everywhere.
Moving quickly to make an impact and reach new audiences
Everything we’ve achieved in our partnership with Mayo Wynne Baxter has occurred relatively quickly. Sure, there was a deadline on the Ampa merger announcement, but what this success story shows is the speed with which we can become a key part of the business, build relationships with key people and potential spokespeople and utilise our experience, network and media relationships to drive tangible business results quickly. Read through our other success stories, and you’ll see a pattern of how we start to work on an initiative and continue to support the growth of a law firm or any other professional services business by raising its profile nationally, within its service sector or to its local audience.
Our clients really do consider us partners with the strategic advice and guidance we can deliver, having achieved results for more than two decades.
