Digital White Papers

I L T A W H I T E P A P E R | K N O W L E D G E M A N A G E M E N T & M A R K E T I N G T E C H N O L O G Y 66 marketing spend – both at the practice level and department level. The increased demand, coupled with the intense fiscal scrutiny and focus on return on marketing investment, means marketing teams will need to be very deliberate and strategic with their 2021 efforts. One positive here is that a lot of firms are increasing their focus on cross-selling initiatives, which is breaking down the traditional practice silos. This presents a prime opportunity for marketing and business development teams to work on a more unified go-to-market strategy that, in the past, might have stumbled across several practice-specific roadblocks. Will the ad-hoc, "fire drill" requests from high- touch practices or rainmaker lawyers go away as your team implements a larger marketing strategy? Of course not. But for most legal marketers, you will see a shift in how work is done and what projects move forward (and why). Trend #2: The Move to Data- Driven Marketing This one is not a surprise to many of you. Legal marketing as a discipline has recognized data as a critical piece of the marketing puzzle, but many teams have struggled to shift to a fully data-driven approach. There is a MASSIVE amount of data within any law firm. Building a strategy around that data requires a commitment to building platforms, processes, and people to derive insights from the data. On the technology front, there are several new and existing technologies that allow marketers to aggregate and/or analyze firm data to make actionable decisions. But before you start researching vendors, step back and ask, "What are we trying to do, and why?" Are you trying to get a better idea of client satisfaction and churn? Then you may want to pull in client feedback, annual billings, A/R, and relationship data. Or are you wanting to draw a line from the first email to a prospect all the way to a buying decision? Then you'd want marketing engagement (email, events) data, CRM activity, relationship data, and opportunity records. Those are just a couple of examples, but knowing the problems you are trying to solve will inform what data you need and what systems provide that data. Attorneys are increasingly coming to marketing to say, "Tell me something about this client/prospect that I don't know." There are many data points in the firm systems (particularly in the marketing tech stack) that can be aggregated to build a dossier for lawyers and their practices. A great example is the Hot Prospect report, which pulls in marketing engagement data around a particular topic. It presents this data to a lawyer or practice leader and shows which people are most interested in the blogs/ emails/events around a specific topic. Trend #3: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Automate Everything Stop me if you've heard this one before. The marketing demand from lawyers and their practices is continually increasing, but the marketing resources – whether it's personnel or dollars – aren't growing to keep up. If the workload is increasing, but the number of hands to contribute hasn't, automation can help alleviate the burden. Automation introduces efficiencies to your workflow with little maintenance and oversight. But where to start? There are many areas of opportunity, depending on the platforms and processes your team has in place. Here are a few ideas that may help make some of your work more efficient.

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