Marketing Automation for lawyers?

Law firms often believe that marketing department will help them quickly and easily acquire dozens of new clients. The truth is many of them don’t follow and cope with the latest marketing technologies and solutions and they are practically absent in digital communication channels.

Lack of business experience

The first possible issue is that managing their law companies, lawyers are indeed excellent in their job but not necessarily good leaders. They might not have appropriate experience to run a business and they manage the business mainly due to outstanding achievements in the field of law, rather then business. Therefore, without proper knowledge in the course of business management, marketing department seem to be minor or even trivial element for them. Only understanding rules and mechanisms in the business nowadays will allow to realize and appreciate the value of effective marketing.

To understand relevant vocabulary

There’s a huge discrepancy in the vocabulary used by lawyers and rest of the world. Organizations related to technologies and other B2B organizations communicate in categories of leads, demand generation, sales teams and ROI rating. For law companies it can be really difficult to think of their clients as ‘leads’ and right away decide to implement sophisticated marketing campaigns. However, in the times of huge competition and more and more demanding clients, this seems to be necessary.

Lack of funds

In the USA, the average expenses of law firms on marketing represents about 2,4–2,8% gross revenue, while the average is 9% for companies in the world. Without appropriate funding, marketing teams are not able to operate effectively and lawyers, not seeing the results, don’t want to invest more. Indeed, 2% is too little for effective campaigns.

Ideally, one would treat marketing expenses as an investment, which will secure appropriate return in due time. Marketers help reach wider audience of recipients at a lower cost then individual efforts of each of the lawyers separately. They can be in touch with potential customers, providing them with information and content, which will help take advantage of lawyers’ services when required. In the meantime, lawyers can focus on direct relations and interactions with key and current clients.

Law firms and the Internet

It’s been a while since newspapers were main source of information. These days, most of potential customers in demand, start searching for a lawyer in the Internet. Therefore, visibility in the Internet is indispensible and we don’t mean ordinary WWW page only. A great idea to share your knowledge is an expert blog or social media channels, where one can share his/her knowledge on a daily basis. A job of a lawyer has always been based on human relations. It’s worth to invest in such communication resources, which will allow to reach potential, current and business clients successfully.

Having an advert on an industry webpage will increase our visibility. However, this way we won’t learn to what extent our message was successful. Yet, Marketing Automation tools will allow to track the effectiveness of our marketing activities. Such software will precisely indicate if the advert directed people further to our webpage or blog, if they read our articles and e-mails and will identify who and when visits our WWW page and their interests as well. All results will be displayed in form of clear tables and graphs. It is estimated that businesses taking advantage of Marketing Automation systems, acquire potential customer growth by 450%. This can be interpreted as a clear sign that the time has come for Marketing Automation in law industry.

3 simple steps with Marketing Automation for law firms

Lead Nurturing

Clients of law firms look for answers to specific questions so such client education is essential. Simple automatic series of messages, which will be sent to each acquired contact in equal time intervals, will allow to attract higher number of persons to take advantage of particular law company. Such program could consist of 5 messages:

Introduce law firm and a lawyer
Explain benefits of using professional law company
Inform about the range of available services
Explain the process of cooperation with law firm and a lawyer
Invite for an introductory meeting/conversation

After series of such messages, clients will be more conscious, higher level of knowledge will dispel their doubts and they will be more willing to visit law firm and take advantage of their services.

Automatic client segmentation

Every law company either offers various range of law services or is specialized in a few specific areas. SALESmanago monitors behavior of persons on WWW page, seeing which pages have been browsed by particular visitor. On that basis, it can automatically assign segment of interest to a particular person and then automatically educate them in the scope of their interests, like for example property, divorce, etc.

Automatic pop-up forms on WWW page

Since we have clients segments on WWW page, it’s wise to display a pop-up form providing information in the area of their interests. How about such a message to a segment interested in inheritance issues:

“Do you have problem with your inheritance? See us for a free advice.”

Forms of such type are filled in more often as they give recipient exactly what he/she needs. Thanks to this, anonymous visitors are converted to particular contacts by Marketing Automation system.