It is 2022, let the robots do it!

Part of creating efficiencies in your marketing department is selecting and utilizing the right tools to streamline your law firm’s marketing and business development operations. But with so many options, where do you start? LISI’s Director of Client Strategy Kristyn Brophy and Director of Marketing Technology + Operations Dan Martin for an Ask Me Anything session all about Marketing Technology for Law Firms.

Kristyn:

Hello everyone and happy Friday. Thank you for joining us for LISI’s weekly livestream today. I am Kristyn Brophy, Director of Client Strategy at LISI. Today I am joined by Dan Martin, our Director of Marketing Technology and Operations. How are you today, Dan?

Dan:

Doing good. I’m happy it’s Friday and happy there’s playoff baseball on later.

Kristyn:

Oh yeah. What’s this that you Philadelphians call it? Red October? Is that what it is?

Dan:

Yes, Red October. Since they’re red and it’s October. We’re very creative in Philadelphia.

Kristyn:

I’m from Title Town, so that’s not very creative. Just because we have the most amount of titles for the 2000s here in Boston.

Dan:

That’s for another livestream.

Kristyn:

That’s for another livestream, yes. But congratulations for your Red October for the Phillies. I know you’re a huge fan. I can’t say that I’m a big baseball fan. I don’t follow baseball. I’m a big football fan though, and your Eagles are doing great this season. I’m very proud of you for that. Unfortunately, I can’t say that we’re doing as well here in New England.

Anyway, I could talk football all day. But today we are here to talk about marketing technology for law firms. Welcome to all of our listeners who are listening on the livestream, and then to anyone who is listening to the replay of the podcast or the replay of this livestream video, welcome. Thank you for joining us. I’m happy to have you here. We received a lot of really great questions in advance about this subject, marketing technology. I’ll run through some of those questions with Dan. I’m sure some may come through as the livestream goes on, but if you do have a question or a comment, please drop it on the comment. Say hi, we’d love to hear from you and all of our wonderful followers from LISI.

The biggest thing that I think a lot of people ask is what exactly is marketing technology? We commonly refer to it as just Martech, or if you’re from Boston, MahTech. It’s this rapidly evolving field in marketing, and it’s been rapidly evolving since 2011. If you’re familiar with Martech, then you probably know the name Scott Brinker. He’s the father of the infamous Martech map. And when Scott began tracking his Martech landscape in 2011, there were 150 marketing technology solutions. And today in 2022, as of May 3, 2022, there are 9,932 marketing technology solutions. Holy crap.

Dan:

Quite the jump.

Kristyn:

That’s a huge jump and a huge development. Today we’ll talk about how Martech fits into the law firm. Feel free to drop in your questions and ask us anything, as such as the name of our livestream, Ask Me Anything. As we dive in we’ll talk more about how you can leverage this Martech stack in your law firms, and how these can be some great solutions to create efficiencies for your firm and such. So Dan, I’m going to start with the first question. What is a Martech stack?

Dan:

Let’s set the table a little bit. A Martech stack is just essentially a fancy way of saying the list of marketing technologies that your firm might be using. It’s not called a list because with marketing technology using different platforms for different things, one of the key things to do in marketing technology is to stack them or integrate them essentially. So for example, let’s say you’re running pay-per-click advertising. The marketing technology you might use for that would be Google Ads. But then how are you tracking the leads that are coming from that? Are they staying in Google ads? Or are they maybe tracked through to Google Analytics and then maybe to your C.R.M. like a HubSpot? So kind of stacking those technologies so that silos are broken down kind of gives you more visibility across your marketing efforts.

Kristyn:

Nice. Apologies, I am recovering a little from COVID, so I’ll be muting myself if I have to have a coughing attack, which is what just happened. But yeah, that’s really great. I never thought of using Martech stack and integration within the same descriptor, so that’s really helpful. So next question that we received in advance, what are your Martech stack options? So what are my Martech stack options for my law firm, and what applications make up a Martech stack?

Dan:

As we mentioned in the intro, there’s a ton of marketing technology available. That tech can often be bucketed into bigger categories, and they tend to be different for different industries and companies, and different for different law firms. Put simply, you want technology that fits into the stages of attracting clients. So how are you attracting potential clients? How are you addressing their consideration when they’re considering your firm versus another firm? How are you helping them decide to choose your firm? And how are you retaining them as a client? How are you further delighting them with content and things like that?

So for example, you might be attracting client, again, through pay-per-click advertising. And within that advertising marketing technology bucket, there might be X amount of technologies to choose from. As a client considers your firm, perhaps they’re reading the thought leadership that you’re putting on your website, which may be WordPress for instance. WordPress kind of fits into the content and experience platform bucket of marketing technology. So then as they decide on your firm, perhaps you’ve responded to an R.F.P. leveraging assets stored in your digital asset management system. So that’s content. That’s another example of marketing technology.

And how are you keeping those people happy? How are they reviewing your firm? A lot of firms leverage Google reviews, typically the smaller firms like personal injury. But you might be using something like a Trustpilot for post-interviews and retention, things like that. So that’s kind of an example of what applications might make up a Martech stack. But ultimately it depends on your firm and your goals.

Kristyn:

Really quick question, what is a Trustpilot?

Dan:

Trustpilot’s just a marketing technology that’s like Google Reviews, except a little bit more in-depth. It kind of combines surveying, and it’s just another way of doing reviews pretty much.

Kristyn:

Good to know. Good to know. So you have your Martech stack set up and you know which technologies you want to be implementing for your firm and whatnot. Do I have to know how to code to use Martech? Should I let my IT team handle this? Does marketing need to be involved? Do I need to know these things in order to implement it?

Dan:

Yeah, so I think it’s great that you kind of group those two questions together. Because to me the genesis of this question is, is marketing technology too difficult to understand or implement? I’m going to answer this question with a real life example. So Kristyn, did you study graphic design or go to the Art Institute of Philadelphia or RISD or anything like that?

Kristyn:

No, not at all. I mean, I know graphic design, but I didn’t study it.

Dan:

You did. It’s not your primary. So have you created digital graphic assets and videos for clients, for example?

Kristyn:

Sure have.

Dan:

Yeah. So this is all possible using a tool called Canva. So there’s a ton of examples like this. In the past maybe you had to go to your web developer to build out a landing page. Now you can do that with a simple drag-and-drop interface with a tool like Unbounce. The point I’m trying to make here is that marketing technology has come a long way and is a little bit more accessible to everybody across the organization. There are a ton of no-code or low-code platforms like Canva or Unbounce, which we already mentioned, that pretty much anybody in your firm can use.

The most important thing to note here is that while things may be more accessible, you still want to involve IT and marketing and any marketing technology project, just to make sure they’re on the same page. Perhaps, Kristyn, you want to implement a marketing technology that might be a security risk and maybe you don’t know that because the IT policies are not as visible to you in the marketing department as it would be to somebody to IT. So while most everybody can use a lot of these platforms now, I think it’s still best practice to keep everybody involved, whether it be from marketing and IT, as long as you’re onboarding and considering technology.

Kristyn:

Gotcha. All right, good to know. I’ve always worked under the guise of marketing and IT should really work together collaboratively. And that’s good to know that as you’re installing these things, you can work with different members of your team and stuff. So that’s really good. The next question that came up is, I am a small firm, and how do I utilize marketing technology when I have little to no budget? Is it expensive?

Dan:

Yeah, so that’s a great question. We said we almost have 10,000 platforms in the intro here. So marketing technology can be expensive. The enterprise level, Salesforce for instance, it certainly isn’t the answer if you’re a three-person personal injury firm. But marketing technology doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive. There’s a lot of technologies today that offer a lower tier or that is relatively inexpensive.

For example, let’s say you want to do email marketing. That’s something that we do for a lot of our clients. I know one of our favorites at LISI here is MailChimp, and they do offer a free tier where you can store, I think it’s up to 500 contacts and send almost 3,000 emails a month or something.

If you’re a one-person or a three-person small firm, that might be enough for you. There’s plenty of resources out there to kind of research this stuff. I would encourage you to check out the Martech 5000 database, which is kind of pioneered by Scott Brinker, who we mentioned at the beginning. And leverage review sites like Capterra and G2 when evaluating technology. You just want to make sure, what is the right fit for my budget and for the goals of my firm? With so many options, you’re sure to find something that can get you started. Perhaps that free MailChimp that you’re using for a couple months brings in a couple new clients, and now you have a little bit more money to reinvest into some marketing technology. Maybe you can upgrade to the next tier or something like that. So it doesn’t have to be expensive, but it can get expensive.

Kristyn:

I know one of the biggest things about the free tier level of MailChimp is the MailChimp branding stays on it. That’s another thing. If you don’t mind the MailChimp logo being on your email, then that free tier might be just perfect for you,

Dan:

Right. Yeah, there’s certainly sometimes catches to these things, but as you grow, it might be something that you might have to deal with for a little bit, you know what I mean? It just kind of depends. Again, it depends on your goals and what you’re comfortable with.

Kristyn:

Exactly. Alrighty, this is a really important question. How do I get all of my applications to talk to each other? That’s important.

Dan:

So walk over to IT and grab one of the developers. No, I’m kidding.

Kristyn:

Great answer. Cool.

Dan:

As we mentioned earlier with our Canva example, marketing technology is kind of accessible across anybody in your firm. Technologies today typically leverage APIs to talk to each other. So creating these app integrations has become a lot simpler. I don’t have to know how to code, to our earlier point, to set my HubSpot and my Google Sheets to talk to each other. There’s a simple tool that we use at LISI called Zapier that’s very drag-and-drop. You just go pull up Zapier and say, “Okay, when somebody fills out my Unbounce landing page form, I want a Google Sheet to populate with those so that I can track leads.” And it’s very simple. It’s very human language. Like, “I want leads to go into my Google Sheets.” You don’t need somebody to know JSON and JavaScript and things like that. So there’s Zapier, there’s other tools that kind of are drag and drop and connecting those K.P.I.s. I would look into that.

Kristyn:

It’s really nice that a lot of technologies that I’ve been implementing with my outsourced marketing clients, they’ll talk to each other just because there’s an open K.P.I. readily available.

One example, I keep going back to MailChimp just because we use it so frequently, but MailChimp and Clio for example, the case management and C.R.M. software that’s out there and contact management, it has a one-to-one integration with MailChimp. You barely have to do anything with your coding and such to get them to talk to each other. So there are definitely those options out there too that just already have these integrations built in.

Dan:

Right. Sometimes it’s natively built in, to your point. Or let’s say for instance, you’re using WordPress, which we use at LISI and a lot of our clients use, they have a lot of plugins. And so if you have HubSpot as your C.R.M., WordPress is a HubSpot plugin where you can just kind of embed those forms and all that. When you fill out a form on my website, it goes directly into HubSpot. There’s very easy ways to connect these things nowadays.

Kristyn:

Yeah, it’s just so great. I love it. Technology is wonderful with all the developments.

So speaking of all of the developments that have happened in recent years, do I need to be concerned about data privacy?

Dan:

I love this question because I think I am the most privacy-forward person on the LISI team. I’m always looking out for the new trends and kind of the developments and things like that and keeping you guys updated. Data privacy should always be considered, in my opinion, especially with the wave of state-level legislation. You got legislation already passed in states like California, Utah, Colorado, and Virginia. And potentially there’s a federal data privacy law coming down the pike that will look something similar to the GDPR. So your customer’s privacy should always be a concern of yours.

Luckily, as the old Apple commercial states, I think it was like 2006 or something. “There’s an app for that.” You remember that one?

Kristyn:

Oh yeah.

Dan:

So an exploding bucket of Martech is what’s called customer identity and access management. These are tools that kind of help you create those lovely cookie bars that we see on every website nowadays. There’s even ones that kind of take that a step further and keep a logbook of when Kristyn visits my site, oh, she accepted the cookies, and then connects that to your C.R.M., like maybe a HubSpot or your C.D.P., like a segment. So we would recommend discussing your privacy concerns with a privacy professional should you have any questions, but obviously always consider your customers’ and potential clients’ data privacy.

Kristyn:

Yeah, absolutely. And it all began with the CAN-SPAM Act, like this data privacy and not being able to go out. I feel like with that federal ruling that happened during the Bush administration I believe it was, it’s bound to be another federal data privacy update in the future. It’s time.

Dan:

Yeah, absolutely. So Kristyn, I’m actually going to steal the mic from you here and ask you a question.

Kristyn:

Sounds good.

Dan:

So as you’ve kind of interacted with some of our clients, what have you seen as the biggest hurdle in terms of marketing technology adoption at a law firm? Have you seen any trends, or do you have any advice in that regard?

Kristyn:

Ooh, this is a really, really great question, but also a really tough one. I hate that I always give this answer, but it is an answer that covers everything. It depends. It depends on your firm. It depends on what the priorities are, what your budget can be. Because the larger firms with 50, 75, 100 attorneys and a full marketing department and IT department who can support these technologies might have much different priorities from a small… Sorry, I live on a main road in Summerville, Massachusetts and somebody did not like my answer “It depends.” Anyway. If you have a big firm with the departments that can handle this, then you can spend a little bit more money, spend a little bit more focus, have more technologies that’ll talk to each other. But if you’re a smaller shop and you outsource your marketing, like my clients outsource to LISI, then your technology and Martech stack priorities might be a little different.

One of the biggest hurdles that I see regardless of the size of the firm is, who’s responsible for implementing this, and which version of this technology are we going to implement? We were talking about tiers of different technologies that are available. So maybe you’ve nailed down, okay, MailChimp is going to be my email service provider. This is what I’m going to use as my email marketing tool. What tier do we need? So that’s when you also have to look at how many contacts you may have, how many emails you’d like to send out in a month. Are you going to implement a strategy with maybe a monthly newsletter, a quarterly newsletter? Are you using this for client alerts and updates? Are you using this as a blog subscription tool? What are your priorities, and how many emails are you going to need to send in order to determine that tier?

And then once you determine that tier, who at the firm is overseeing this project? The smaller firms tend to have a more difficult time with that because they don’t have these internal marketing departments. Or, maybe they have one internal IT person that can kind of help with marketing, but they have to outsource the rest of it. We actually have one client who’s implementing a case management software right now, and a partner at the firm is overseeing that implementation project because that’s what they have capacity for and that’s who they have on staff to be able to help with that. We’re helping a little bit on the back end with the actual tech stuff and getting the different Martech technologies to speak to each other, but the partner is actually responsible for it. And that’s really tough because he also has to go out and practice law and be a partner at a law firm.

So that’s definitely the biggest hurdle. My advice is get your priorities straight before you choose your technology, before you choose your stack. And before you choose who your implementation team is going to be, outline those priorities, whether it be a strategic plan or working with maybe the executive committee at the firm to define that strategy, define those priorities. Once you get that done, that hurdle is the biggest one to jump over, and everything else will kind of fall into place from there.

Another big hurdle that I see is who do I need to get buy-in from? Is it the executive committee? Is it the managing partner? Is it the C.M.O.? Is it the C.T.O., the chief technology officer? Who are the main stakeholders that I need to get buy-in from, and what does that buy-in process look like? My advice is to define what that process looks like before you go and make the proposal to purchase this technology. Because by defining that process ahead of time and then also defining your goals and your priorities, you’re going to get the best return on your investment from those technologies in the long run. And you’ll be able to see their efficacy much more clearly in the long run.

Dan:

And just to add onto that, I will say, again, we mentioned in the intro there’s almost 10,000 technologies out there to choose from. So don’t go out there going alphabet shopping. And by that I mean don’t think to yourself, “Oh, I need a C.R.M., I need a C.D.P., I need a C.M.S. I need all these things.” Start with one, or maybe two, because you probably need a C.M.S. at minimum for your website. But start with one or two, get those working really well, and then figure out what you need to build off of that. So once you have your C.R.M. firing on all cylinders, let’s say a HubSpot for instance, you have all the data coming in that you want, you have it nice and neat. Okay, now what do I need to do with this data? Write that down to your point, document those things. Then you can go out with that use case in your hand and say, “What technologies kind of fit this?” So from this list of 10,000, now there’s only 30 that I can choose from because this fits my use case. So definitely do that.

Marketing technology is a necessary part of your digital presence. It’s 2022, everything’s very digital. Everybody’s walking around with smartphones and there’s screens everywhere. And there’s a bunch of great resources out there that we mentioned. We talked about the Marech 5000 and Scott Brinker. We talked about Capterra and G2, which are essentially review sites. So if Kristyn’s using a HubSpot, she can go on there and say, “HubSpot, five stars, great C.R.M.,” and things like that. So always check out those, and then obviously always check out the LISI blog, because we’re going to try and keep you updated as best we can.

Kristyn:

Yes. Absolutely check out the blog. We will stay updated. And one kind of last piece of advice when it comes to… And I apologize, another big truck just went by, I don’t know if you can hear that. But anyway, another piece of advice to go along with that is ask your colleagues, ask your friends. Maybe you have a friend at a firm that implemented a technology that you are looking to implement at your own firm. Ask them what their pain points were through the implementation process. Ask them for a very candid opinion, if they’re willing to give it to you, of that technology and their candid opinion from someone that you trust and you already know and like is really going to help you in making your decision for your firm. Maybe that will show you that, oh yeah, this technology really is perfect for my firm. Or it’ll tell you that it’s not the right technology for you and it’s time to go back and find maybe a different solution.

Dan:

Yeah, definitely communicate with your colleagues. I think an example that we have, Kristyn, you’re looking to kind of upgrade our social scheduling perhaps. I don’t really have anything to do with social posting and things like that, so I need to get knowledge from you to say, “Okay, I need a technology that kind of makes my job easier rather than harder.” You know the use case better than me, so kind of have those open lines of communication, because one person in this part of marketing might not do all the things that this person in marketing does every day. So just have those open lines of communication.

Kristyn:

Exactly. And it’s great to rely on your colleagues for that.

Well, I think we’re about at 25 minutes, so that’s the typical time for our live stream. I don’t think we have any other questions that have come in, so I think this wraps it up. So thank you everybody for joining us for this livestream, and thank you to the listeners who are listening to the recordings after the fact. Again, I’m Kristyn Brophy, joined by Dan Martin, and please check out our blog for more marketing technology updates. We’ll be happy to keep you updated.

Dan:

Yep. Thank you, everybody.

Kristyn:

Thanks.