Digital White Papers

40 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER POTPOURRI Adapt and Adopt: Bring Marketing Automation to Your Firm » Leverage enthusiastic early adopters who do all the right marketing actions. Get those lawyers to outline the benefits of what they do and share "case studies" with more reticent partners. » Use nudge theory to take advantage of lawyers' competitive nature. Ask them who their peers are and benchmark them against each other in categories such as number of hits on their page of the website, number of cross-sell leads, etc. Reporting will quantify the effect of the lawyers' marketing efforts. You should be able to automate information from various platforms to generate a report for the partners, which proves the marketing they undertake has a direct effect on their success. Generate Quantifiable New Business: In the non-legal space, we can automatically track opportunities generated throughout the nurture process. In an environment where we are processing large transactions and a "sale" is oen made with existing clients, the reality of understanding the effect of marketing versus nurturing client relationships is hard to separate. Most firms don't bother to "prove" that marketing works; they assign a target to fee earners. If you can prove that marketing is working, budgets will increase, bonuses will rise, and you will become the chief marketing officer's (or the managing partner's) best friend. To prove that marketing is working at a law firm, the fee earner must be involved. We need to inform lawyers about the opportunities they should take action on. Then we need to automate a follow-up to quantify the success of each initiative. This can be done through feedback, which goes straight into the CRM: Dear {partner} You met with {Client 1}, {Client 2}, {Client 3} at the {seminar} event. Did you generate any opportunities: [Yes] [No] Number of opportunities: Estimated Value: To ensure fee earners provide this information aer every marketing action, you might need to employ a reward method. If you can get management on board, track these actions and tie them to bonuses, as you would with referrals. As an alternative, future marketing activities/spend can be tied to feedback from the aorneys. The key is to make the tracking process simple for everyone involved. Feedback should be delivered automatically to the fee earner, and the data capture should be user- friendly. Automation Is an Asset Marketing automation is possible at law firms, but we have to understand what it means for a legal practice and how to leverage principles used by other industries. It's time to adopt the processes and adapt them for your firm. ILTA ROBIN STEPHENS Robin Stephens is a Director of Vuture, a marketing platform that was built specially for law firms and other professional service companies. Robin consults businesses around the world on the best practices for getting successful results from email and event marketing. For more information, contact Robin at robin.stephens@vutu.re.

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