Failing to Learn from the Pandemic Could Prove Costly for Your Firm
Your future success lies not in business returning to normal but from your ability to catapult your business forward with digital. While many wait for things to get back to normal, few understand that recovery will actually stem from digital. If there is anything you should have learned in 2020, it’s that consumer behavior has changed for the long haul. Failing to address new expectations and conveniences born from the COVID-19 pandemic could be costly to your business.
Law.com put out an article highlighting law firms’ increased shift to digital. While many large firms are moving quickly, digital provides most firms an opportunity to punch above their weight. By deploying the right law firm development strategies, firms can and should better leverage the data they have, become much more CRM-focused, broaden, and improve key metrics and marketing dashboards, and create a digital-first culture.
70% of law firms do not have a call to action on their website.
Peter Drucker once said, the purpose of a business is to create customers and keep them. When he coined that phrase, there was no internet, which means digital one-to-one marketing did not exist. Mass media is often easy to see as a consumer if you are anywhere near the right audience. Digital marketing can be stealth, which means your competition can be picking off your customers without you even knowing. I will spare you elaborate schemes and share only a few simple examples.
Did you know that competitors can retarget people that search for your company? Did you know they can target people who have been to your offices by deploying geo-fenced ads focusing on very specific geographic areas, like a building or parking lot? These are simple examples that show how competitive digital marketing can be. Now consider how complex these efforts could become, building out databases, scoring leads, cross-referencing online behaviors with CRM data, and then automating marketing to drive efficiency from their sales funnel.
According to financesonline.com, 62% of law firms are planning to boost their marketing and business development. While this highlights the increased competition, the same study highlights how much opportunity exists. Of those people that begin their search for an attorney online, 85% of them start with Google. And while 85% of attorneys use social media as part of their strategy, 70% of law firms do not have a call to action on their website, and only 14% of firms send follow up emails to those that completed a contact form.
Most firms believe they have made great strides in terms of changing with the times. While your firm may be a pacesetter and executing ahead of the curve, it has been our experience that most companies have good law firm marketing strategies but are disjointed or incomplete. Here are three things we recommend when it comes to moving from good to great.
- Digital Strategy. Getting consensus and support from management to become digital-first and focus on a data-driven, CRM-centric approach is the first step to transforming your marketing.
- Audiences and Personas. Knowing who your audiences are and how to reach them is critical, but ensuring you communicate with existing customers both before and after services have been rendered is best-in-class execution.
- Marketing Automation. With the right data and methodology for nurturing clients, marketing automation has proven to be effective in increasing marketing performance. This does not mean simply deploying marketing automation, but deploying it strategically.
And when it comes to true digital transformation across the business, some European law firms, as pointed out by the Financial Times, have been pacesetters when it comes to digital. The article not only highlights back-of-the-house automation and process improvements necessary to transform firms but what the pandemic has taught us, which is that the world is moving to digital faster than ever before.
Many areas of legal practice now employ lawyers who are adept at tech: their clients are going digital and so must they.
Like golf and football, a business can be a game of inches. If your goal is to win, being good isn’t enough. The competition is more fierce than most realize and behaviors are changing at an increasingly rapid rate. Don’t be a digital laggard. In 2020, the world advanced five years. You have an opportunity to advance with it and seize opportunities that accompany these new trends. And on a personal note, your call to action should be the same as ours. Give us a call, and let’s talk.