Digital White Papers

38 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER POTPOURRI Adapt and Adopt: Bring Marketing Automation to Your Firm How do you automate in an environment where the marketing team is continually responding to internal client requirements? Outside of the legal profession, the process of marketing automation draws from a huge bank of prepackaged content and automatically delivers it to clients across channels based on their interests, interactions with the company, where they are in the billing cycle and more. While all marketing professionals would love to buy into the client-centric marketing model where content is "magically" delivered based on how your clients are interacting with the organization, we work with professionals who deliver content on top of their day jobs (busy lawyers), according to their agendas and time frames. We don't have a mountain of content to work with. It's hard enough to get partners to use a client relationship management (CRM) system, let alone work with an automation program. Marketing automation practices used by marketing peers outside of legal won't work for us. That doesn't mean we can't adopt marketing automation principles and adapt them to work for the legal profession. Ideas That Work Our goals in marketing automation are to: » Automate repetitive tasks » Nurture client relationships » Provide quantifiable business development opportunities Here are ideas you can implement to accomplish these goals at your firm. Automate Repetitive Tasks: Audit all of your colleagues to discover their manual or repetitive tasks. The more you automate tasks, the higher the quality of their day-to-day work. Staff will be happier (no one likes doing boring work), which will have a positive effect on staff retention. Here are examples of tasks you are likely to find: » Reusing/Refactoring content across multiple channels. There are dozens of ways to automatically pull content between platforms, and this should happen with no additional work (or minimal steps). For example, puing an article onto a website and sending it via email. » Automating the event process. For the most part, event marketing content is controlled by the marketing team, making it optimal for automation. Look at automating information back to the CRM, follow-up/reminders/notification email messages, tracking event aendees back to the CRM and looping partners into the event process. » Automating payment processing between finance and your CRM. » Uploading or downloading. Colleagues involved in this type of work can free a minimum of 30 percent of their time by using marketing automation. Nurture Client Relationships: The nurturing process ingrained in many non-legal automation platforms struggles with the complex Audit all of your colleagues to discover their manual or repetitive tasks. The more you automate tasks, the higher the quality of their day-to- day work.

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