The legal profession's landscape is constantly changing. To stay in the hunt for new business, law offices must employ a variety of available marketing technologies. Doing so will ensure that their ideal clients are receiving their messages without having to work hard to uncover them. Popular platforms for getting the word out about your firm's offerings include social media networks, search engine optimization outputs, and email campaigns. On top of that, you should be using some form of a contact relationship manager (CRM) to help manage your firm's client contacts, as well as a tool to perform marketing-related analyses. If such marketing technologies help legal offices build client bases and continue to grow, they also play a role in making offices more scalable.
Understanding the Need for New Marketing Tools
The dynamics of legal marketing are not what they used to be. What was once a field characterized by print advertising and good old-fashioned word of mouth has evolved into something much more complex. This evolution is due to technology and changes in the way consumers behave. Faced with a digital-first landscape, law firms must be strategic about how they approach marketing to potential clients.
In short, the writing is on the wall when it comes to legal and digital marketing. Legal digital marketing can mean anything, from search engine optimization (SEO) to strategy consulting, to social media and content marketing. Lawyers can’t afford to wait it out — if you’re a law firm, you can be sure that up-and-comers and existing competition look to the internet to win the next case.
Identifying the Right Marketing Tools
Law firms that want to generate more visibility and engagement need the right legal marketing tools. Marketing automation for lawyers can reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks like executing email campaigns and nurturing leads. Instead, these kinds of tools allow law firms to focus on the personal touch necessary for fostering client relationships. They also help firms research, develop, and execute strategies to engage with a segmented audience that will bring in more qualified leads.
Additionally, to create and effectively execute a plan of attack for a specific audience, law firms need the right type of customer relationship management (CRM) tools. Creating and developing targeted communications and reports from segmented data contained within the myriad systems and software that law firms use can mean spending long nights at the office. Further, law firms also need marketing tools that can help them create and maintain a consistent online presence and manage content on social media platforms that engage with a defined audience.
Careful selection of the right tools will enhance a law firm's communications, vastly improving results. At the same time, strategically using marketing value-adds can also strengthen a law firm's expertise and target audience position. That means using the right kinds of CRM—those tuned for law-related marketing content. It also means using social media management software that caters to those types of legal consumers who are most likely to convert either online or at a physical location.
Steps to Integrate New Marketing Technology
To start, take a step back and evaluate what you are doing now. You don't want a gap in coverage, and you want to make sure your firm is keeping up with the competition. Are you effectively reaching your audience? Only by understanding the current state of your legal marketing can you begin to decide on anything else.
During this phase, you should be shopping for — and decide on — legal marketing technology that will help your law firm. CRM systems, social media, or other martech tools? Take a look at tools like Google or Microsoft Ads, analytics tools for digital properties, Zoho, or other databases. See what’s out there.
Training and "doing the work" should be last on your list. Staff will need to know how to function with new tools. Invest the time with your team to make sure they know what they are doing. You will want someone to regularly look at and make recommendations for martech adjustments.
Overcoming Challenges in Integration
Introducing new marketing tools in a law firm has its problems. The main issue will be getting people to change. Many attorneys and staff will be used to the old methods of marketing. They might also be afraid of the new software programs that can help—or, at least, be afraid of learning how to use them. This is why it’s important to also arrange a series of very basic sessions at each training event to encourage the “slower adopters.” By running one or two one-hour “special pieces,” you can clearly show how easy it is to “use” a specific piece of software. Seeing something being used in this way is one of the best ways of learning to do it yourself.
The other big problem is probably going to be money. Even when everything is explained to the people in charge, you might find that they still don’t want to part with any of their money. If this is the case, look for the tool that will be the least expensive to regularly use outside your workplace. This could involve trying to run a pilot project from inside where you are currently working.
Measuring Success and ROI
It is essential to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will enable you to measure the effectiveness of the integrated marketing you will be doing. These could be lead generation (i.e., reaching potential customers with website content or social media messaging, or at seminars and other events), lead conversion (i.e., converting leads into paying clients), and client attrition, among others. Once measured, the results will suggest what marketing refinements may be in order. For example, a high rate of leads with only a few conversions likely suggests that something is off-kilter in the selling process.
It is well-nigh impossible to directly link certain forms of marketing, such as social media and outdoor digital advertising, to a measurable law firm KPI. Still, we think it is helpful for lawyers to determine not to be involved in marketing for which there is no potential ROI.
In the intensely competitive straits of the legal world, other marketing tools must be part of one's larger armory that stands apart from everyone else using the same marketing methods. It's where the world is going to seek services and legal services, which the number of law firms is beginning to realize. They're adopting broad-stroke methods to think about what they do to do this and that and to be this and that in a better way, and those methods are transforming their marketing lives to create a more visible and consciously present legal service.
The legal world must consistently review the tools it employs to attempt to deliver marketing messages that are transforming the businesses of many of those with whom I work. The use of the legal marketing equivalent of some business-to-business social media marketing methods—by SEO, that is—and the advent of client scale web chat, the broader online, and the external firm environment is instilling in those firms a new sense of power to think about developing the new services that deliver their growth. This new thinking is forming the inside of the firms as different service shapes.
