How law firms can benefit from campaign-driven marketing - Lexology
You can’t begin to achieve your law firm’s marketing goals until you clearly define them. Clever commercials or enlightening podcasts will be just that if they are not tied to strategic, measurable goals. Once you define your goals, you can develop a strategic campaign to meet them and measure your return on investment.
What is campaign-driven marketing?
A marketing campaign is a collection of activities, such as print ads, TV commercials, white papers and blogposts, focused on a particular topic and aimed at a target. Many professional service firms like Deloitte and Accenture employ a campaign-driven marketing approach, in which they identify key business goals for the company and then develop campaigns around these goals. The idea is to hone in on very specific objectives, develop a campaign to meet them and use relevant metrics to determine how the campaign performed to learn for the future.
How law firms can benefit from this approach
The majority of law firms are not taking advantage of campaign-driven marketing. Law firms typically do not have large in-house marketing departments and being spread thin often leads them to be reactive rather than proactive in their marketing. When marketing lacks a strategic, specific focus, it’s problematic for two reasons: one, it’s highly inefficient to market everything to everyone, and two, without goals in mind, it’s difficult or impossible to measure a campaign’s success. The campaign-driven approach requires firms to look at the big picture: to determine what they care about accomplishing as a business. Once you do that, you can target your marketing efforts more narrowly and track your results more precisely.
Start with objectives
Let’s say your law firm has several business goals for the year. Perhaps you want to grow one or two of your practice areas. Maybe you want to generate awareness of a new office location. Or there may be hot topics – such as new laws passed by the new administration – that businesses will need a law firm’s services to implement, and you want them to choose you. Within these broad goals, develop more specific objectives, such as generating leads, raising brand awareness among influencers or cross-selling to existing clients, and think about what you need to do to accomplish these objectives. Decide what your campaign’s key performance indicators will be – how you will measure its success – and the budget and resources you will need to carry out the campaign. For instance, if your in-house marketing team is bare bones, you may decide to extend your resources by using a good outside agency to create content, develop a targeted media plan and/or analyze metrics.
Craft a campaign using targeted content
The next step is to identify your target market. If your goal is to expand your employment law practice, for instance, think about who your potential buyers are. Your target may include business owners, in-house counsel and HR professionals at companies in a certain geographic area, including existing clients who use your firm for other services. You can then hone in on this target with content to engage them at various stages of the buying process. If a new law will have a sweeping impact on employment practices, you can provide blogposts, videos and client alerts to help educate targeted buyers about how the new law will affect them and why they may need an attorney’s services. As they begin shopping around for a law firm, you can offer free white papers, webinars and e-books to prospects who register to position your firm as experts in the new law. Using the prospects’ registration information, you can then move on to calling them and perhaps offering a free consultation or audit of their employment practices as they move closer to the decision-making phase.
Choose the channels and measure, measure, measure
You need to figure out which distribution channels your audience uses so you will know where to reach them. In some cases, social media sites like LinkedIn or Twitter may be most effective, while email may work best for other targets. Once you determine the channels, you can tailor and format your content appropriately. There is a wide variety of third-party tracking tools available to measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts. Incorporating tracking codes into paid ads and other content and setting up landing pages on your website can allow you to fine-tune your activities midstream. If you have the right tools and key performance indicators in place, you can measure many aspects of your campaign to figure out what went right, what went wrong and what you should do next time.
The takeaway
If the campaign-driven marketing approach sounds overwhelming, start small, with one campaign. By going through all the steps, from determining a goal through measuring results, you can learn what’s involved in each phase while gathering data that can help you with future campaigns.
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source: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=24b7bc8f-d00f-41fd-8029-f0a4694b3f49
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