Digital White Papers

8 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER MARKETING AND BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Taking Care of the Business: Six Trends in Legal Marketing goals. Using these tools can improve the success of lateral hires and more effectively achieve the expected ROI. Analytics and Attribution Over the last decade, marketing departments have experienced ever-increasing pressure to prove their worth to the organization. This is with good reason. According to the 2017 Aberdeen study, "A Marketing Reality-Check for CMOs on Revenue Aribution," more than half of marketers are unsure of how their efforts connect to revenue. They have no revenue aribution model in place to connect spend with return. The transformation from a cost center that churns out prey ads to a content-focused revenue- generator takes time and effort. And it has to be built around metrics and analytics that move the business forward. Vanity metrics like clicks on web pages and digital ads or click-through and open rates of email messages don't tie directly into the profit line of the firm. Marketing's success must be aligned directly with that of the firm's. To do so, the right metrics must be agreed upon, tracked and reported to show program success and then analyzed to determine how to improve future programs. For instance, marketing should aspire to track data demonstrating their influence on: » Winning the business of a new client » Expanding the business of a current client » Increasing the firm's win rate » Increasing cross-selling activities » Improving relationships within the firm 6 » Increasing client satisfaction scores » Selling a line of services » Increasing the overall revenue of the firm The only way for marketing to have influence in the organization, secure dollars for technology improvements, and increase marketing resources and budgets is to prove through data that what they do every day affects the firm's boom line positively. The key is gaining alignment and buy-in on what success looks like and then delivering objective data against those goals. The Role of CRM The right CRM tool helps bring all the aforementioned pieces together into one cohesive client engagement strategy, ultimately improving the revenue growth of the firm. While different teams within law firms have traditionally worked as individual representatives of the firm — each with their own way of approaching business development — advanced CRM technologies give all relevant parties in the firm a holistic view of what other teams are doing, improving the potential for collaboration. That holistic approach encourages individuals and teams to make the lead team aware of expertise they can contribute and whether they have existing relationships within the target company that might help advance the firm's BD effort. In today's hypercompetitive legal services market, firms need every tool at their disposal to improve relationships with existing clients, with potential new clients and within the firm. By focusing on delivering experiences that match the individualized interests and actions of their targeted audiences, law firms will stand out. ILTA TONI MINICK Toni Minick joined LexisNexis in 2005 and currently serves as Director of Product Management for the company's leading client relationship offering, InterAction. Her background in both product management and software user experiences spans more than 15 years, 12 of which have been focused on legal software solutions. From that knowledge base of customer understanding, Toni is committed to helping users address problems in simple and elegant ways. Contact her at toni.minick@lexisnexis.com.

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