In preparation for the 2019 Legal Marketing Association Annual Conference, a group of legal marketers came together on April 8th to discuss some of the best innovations, and biggest problems, facing legal marketing departments today.
Do you have a problem connecting the elements of your marketing stack? Struggling to connect your marketing activities to business and ROI? Need help determining which tools best suit your needs? Read on for my top takeaways from the Rise of the Legal Marketing Technologist pre-conference program.
1. Find a way to close the conversion pipeline gap
E-commerce follows a very specific flow through the sales process. Marketing and advertising lead to engagement, eventually converting a lead to a customer and ultimately a loyal client.
In Big Law, however, there is a gap in conversion.
You may market well and engage potential clients, but how do you bridge the pipeline gap from identifying a lead to creating a client? You may be able to see an individual’s interaction with your marketing emails and know who they work for, but generally in Big Law you do business with the company instead of the individual.
Adam Stock from Allen Matkins suggests that you must “reconstruct” who the important individuals are to close this gap. You must work with the attorneys, client teams, and practice groups to connect the dots between your leads and the specific leads who have become clients.
Additionally, your business development team can use an enterprise relationship management system (ERM) such as Gwabbit to aid in engagement scoring and help identify these important contacts that you may lose because of the gap in the sales pipeline.
2. When working with vendors it is important to integrate all of your systems
Integration of all of your systems, and thus your data, is a key component to having an efficiently operating marketing stack.
So often financial and marketing data is kept in separate systems that do not communicate with each other. It is critical to bring together your back-end data with marketing data to get a full picture of your audience and of your interaction with key clients and contacts. This full picture can aid in determining your ROI for various marketing activities and communications.
3. Senior level marketers must become a part of creating strategic plans
According to Bloomberg, 67% of chief marketing officers (CMO) and chief business development officers (CBOD) do not have a seat on their firm’s management committee.
David Ackert suggests these marketers need to move from support staff to strategic advisors and create their own seat at the table. If a business case can be made for investing in business development activities, firm leadership are more likely to buy in.
Following leadership buy-in must be lawyer buy-in.
According to the Altman Weil 2018 Law Firms in Transition Survey, in 69% of law firms, partners resist most change efforts. However, if you analyze your marketing activities to determine top ROI categories, leadership and lawyers will buy in if you prove the value behind your data.
4. Data visualization platforms are key to connecting all of your data points together and proving your worth
Legal is trailing far behind other industries in marketing automation and connecting key data points and performance indicators. This is a huge pain point for many legal marketers.
A visualization tool can ease some of these pains. By connecting data from your CRM, email platforms, social media, and accounting software you can measure key performance indicators and assign a value to your marketing activities that ties revenue directly back to your marketing team.
Determining which events provide the highest ROI and which are money pitfalls can greatly assist in your team’s yearly planning and strategy, as well as help you set an efficient budget.
Integrate Your Systems and Data
The theme building throughout the day and from presentation to presentation was not only how to choose the right systems but how to integrate those systems, with the ultimate goal of getting the most out of not just the marketing stack, but out of all of your marketing, website and back-end data. There were many valuable insights offered, and the chance to connect and discuss pain points, successes and solutions with some of the best marketers in the legal industry made for a tremendous program.
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Ryan Agan is a Marketing Technology Coordinator at law firm Bradley
