Digital White Papers

I L T A W H I T E P A P E R | M A R K E T I N G T E C H N O L O G Y 5 I N T R O B Y K AT E C A I N ILTA's 2019 Marketing Technolo Survey Results • Know Your Firm: Strong connections and seamless collaboration across business functions is critical to providing a strong foundation from which to build • Know Your Data: Clean, comprehensive data can be leveraged to anticipate client needs, assess opportunities and drive strategic decision making • Know Your Tools: Embracing technolo to streamline processes creates capacity to focus on higher value strategic efforts • Know Your Audience: Pushing your lawyers to set aside what they want to say and truly focus on their clients and what they want is the most direct route to success In five years, I will be surprised if "marketing technolo" is still "a thing." Not because I think technolo will be less important. Rather, technolo will be so engrained in what we do and how we do it that it won't occur to anyone to think of it separately. ILTA W hen I started my first law firm IT job in 1998, the firm did not actually have a marketing and business development function. The term "marketing technolo" was not part of their vocabulary—not even as a distant point on the tech roadmap. Fast forward to today. As I flipped through the latest marketing technolo survey results, I was struck by the number of acronyms—CRM and ERM, CMS, EMS, EDM, SEO, KPI and so on. It is as if the worlds of IT and Marketing have collided. The lines that once separated those two worlds have blurred, at the very least, if they haven't disappeared completely. Our contributors talk about the importance of aligning marketing technolo and content with firm strate and client needs. They rightly point out the need to collaborate across functions to meet the increasing complex demands of a constantly changing market. While this will be challenging, there is real opportunity Marketing Technolo professionals to lead or, as John Witts puts it, "to plant a flag in the ground when it comes to firm data" in order to make the best use out of their firm's data. There is an old saying in the business world… It's not what you know—it's who you know. The right connections were all you needed to succeed. Of course, this saying dates back to when legal marketing was described as "just waiting for the phone to ring." Nothing is that simple these days. Given the survey results and the wise words of our contributors, I believe there are actually four critical things "to know" if you are a marketing or business development professional:

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