On Thursday, July 16, Cyndy McCollough, Director of Marketing Technology at Dickstein Shapiro, presented the program “Using Technology in Legal Marketing” to the Future Leaders group of the Legal Marketing Association Capital Chapter. The event focused on the different technologies that are vital to law firm success and future trends that enable firms to evolve along with the world of technology.
The role of the marketing technologist is relatively new to law firms. Previously, firms had IT project managers or CRM data stewards that worked closely with the marketing team, but few sought to tie the roles together in a meaningful way. Today, more firms are embracing this need for a specialized marketing technology role as they begin to adopt the latest digital trends. The role has evolved into more of a “digital strategist” rather than a marketing technologist, as it involves assessing which technologies meet the firm’s needs and how to effectively use this technology to meet the firm’s business development goals and achieve ROI.
The eight core areas that law firms focus their technologies on are: websites, client databases, social media, collateral, email, events, experience, and proposals. Any one practice group has a variety of business development goals, most of which need a thoughtful digital strategy in place in order to achieve them. This could mean a number of technological avenues: conducting research across different databases for competitive intelligence and client prospecting; planning events using a contact system to collect RSVPs and disseminate event information; preparing customized responses to RFPs and pitch requests; or raising and tracking your visibility across social media platforms, the firm website, and internal and external publications. The baseline technology every law firm should have in place is an enterprise content management system, which is used to capture, manage, store, and deliver content across multiple platforms.
The three major trends at the moment are adapting to a mobile environment, developing visitor-specific content, and customer journey mapping. As people have moved to a mobile lifestyle, emails and websites must be responsively designed to accommodate any screen size as more people use their smartphones and tablets to read content. Being able to get the most out of your content is imperative, which is why it is important to develop a focused content strategy in which one piece of content is pushed out to several relevant platforms, thereby giving it “nine lives” so to speak. It is also essential that your customers are able to easily find what they are looking for and that the information is easily digestible, which is why customer journey mapping is such a useful tool. With the mapping, a profile is prepared for each of your targeted audiences (e.g., GC, lateral, staff), which allows you to create a content strategy around that individual that addresses every stage in the selling journey, from building awareness to solidifying the client relationship.
Ms. McCollough also offered several recommendations for professionals who are looking to grow in a marketing technology role:
- Share your tools and capabilities with other departments within your firm.
- Look outside of the legal industry for inspiration. Don’t always do what other law firms do.
- Measure your results and target them to show ROI.
- Rethink the marketing technologist job title. Sell yourself as a marketer who is a digital strategist.
- Network with other associations, conferences, and even LinkedIn groups.
- Develop your own personal brand.
By Ashley Briggs, Business Development Coordinator at Arent Fox LLP, for the July/August 2015 issue of the Capital Ideas Newsletter.