The digital marketing skills you likely don’t know you already have
Personalising customer experiences and messages based on insights is all part of a law firm’s digital marketing profile, says Jenny Hotchin, legal practice lead at iManage.
In a recent survey conducted by Briefing, 63% of industry respondents named digital marketing as the skillset seeing the sharpest increase in demand for hires in 2022. Customer relationship management (CRM) ranked second in the list with 46%. Crucially, CRM also ranked as the number one aspect that respondents believe could have the biggest impact at their firm. Kristina Oliver at Keystone Law says, “most of the marketing we now do – that everybody does – is digital, but at the same time we really do have to value and prioritise personal relationships.”
It could be argued that CRM is part of the extended marketing funnel. Lawyers are already personalising customer experiences and messages based on insights, like any good marketing nurture campaign. The 2020 pivot to remote working saw a huge shift in working habits and dynamics, not only in how we communicate with our clients, but also in expectations of how accessible we should be to our clients.
Sell, sell, sell!
LPM Magazine suggests that firms can meet prospective clients where they are. That location is apparently social media sites and review sites. While there is undoubtedly benefit in checking these sources for feedback to help build a more inclusive customer-employee experience, these activities are definitely one for the marketing department to lead on.
One such platform that could fuel the rise of reviews in the public domain is My Legal Marketplace. It aims to boost transparency through price comparison of legal work, reports Artificial Lawyer. With a drive towards fixed fee work, reviews could mean the difference between picking up or losing a client.
An open-source research project into remote working has collected data on productivity since 2004 and makes for nervy reading for those executives trying to usher staff back into expensive office units. It feels like we’re well bedded into in the new norm of remote working, and much of it relies on our ability to communicate with our peers and clients at the right time with the right information. A sudden rush to recruit digital natives may be necessary for outbound marketing efforts, but using CRM to build a more inclusive customer-employee experience is a job for us all.
