Marketing teams worldwide rely heavily on technology to get the results they need. And legal marketing is no different.
It’s time to look beyond conventional solutions and invest in emerging marketing automation technologies that reduce costs and refine the customer journey to generate and nurture qualified leads. On top of that, studies have shown that when marketers automate ads and social media posts, they save up to 6 hours of work every week.
And that’s not all; by automating follow-up and outreach emails, businesses respond to customers 250% faster.
Let’s discuss the what, why, and how of marketing automation tech for legal marketers.
What Is Marketing Automation?
In the simplest terms, marketing automation is when MarTech (marketing technology) improves your marketing processes. This happens in two main ways: scaling on activities or decreasing the time needed to launch them.
Marketing has several frameworks under its umbrella, and the AARRR model, which stands for Activation, Acquisition, Referral, Retention, and Revenue, depicts the stages prospective clients usually go through.
This model, in particular, works well with marketing automation tools as it reflects the entire journey clients go through when hiring a law firm. It can help you keep up engagement with prospects and keep them interested for the long-term as well.
Why Is Automation Helpful For Legal Marketers?
Legal marketing can be challenging because there are a lot of bases to cover and many mediums to use, such as blogs, landing pages, social media, and more. And since the law industry is constantly evolving, there are a lot of aspects to go through.
So, if attorneys have to market their firm or services, it can be pretty overwhelming as their work is already quite demanding. Taking that into account, it is natural for them to look for ways to make work more efficient and straightforward. This is where marketing automation tools can come in handy, helping them streamline and automate many marketing tasks that would otherwise take forever to complete.
Moreover, there are two other benefits of marketing automation that legal marketers should consider:
Improved Efficiency
Law firms don’t want prospective clients to think they don’t care, making outreach an integral aspect of the legal marketing process.
Your prospective audiences form an impression of you based on their first few interactions with your law firm, so marketers need to ensure their initial communication should be personalized, relevant, and helpful. And to do that, marketing automation technologies come into play.
The technology that we will be discussing further down the road can help marketers easily develop an amicable professional relationship with clients without putting in an extensive amount of effort or time. Thus, this allows them to be more efficient.
Ensures Consistency
As marketing tech is becoming more advanced, so is the general population and the mediums they use. For example, a 2017 study conducted by Forrester showed that 95% of people utilize a minimum of three channels to connect with companies, whereas 62% use more than just one device.
Marketing automation helps integrate all marketing channels and create a singular approach or system to find landing pages, social media profiles, and more on the platform.
Enhances Personalization
As mentioned earlier, marketing automation allows you to create personalized messages for current and potential clients. But what most people don’t know is that MarTech makes it easy for businesses to divide their audiences into groups by their age, profession, location, or other demographic information.
This makes it easy to serve content that genuinely resonated with your audiences since you can create hyper-personalized marketing collateral that is bound to resonate with every one of them. And that’s how you can ensure that they engage your services.
A survey by Epsilon showed how 90% of consumers find personalization quite appealing and that 80% are more likely to interact with a business if they offer a customized experience. Marketing automation helps because attorneys do not have time to send individual messages to each prospect.
This works because your MarTech platform offers features that allow for the segmentation of your clients. You can decide how you would like to segment them based on factors like:
Geography
You can get potential clients based on where you are located. For example, if your law firms are spread across the country or the state, you can also filter leads outside your service area and create personalized messages for those near your location.
User Behavior
You can specify which actions you are basing your messaging on, such as clicking on your social media posts, opening emails, downloading info, visiting a specific landing page, etc.
Once leads are segmented, communications are automatically personalized. And, just like that, each interaction prospective or current clients have with your firm is meaningful.
How Is Marketing Automation Used?
So, now that we know why law firms should leverage marketing automation, we should discuss the how.
Essentially, any process has the potential to be automated (without becoming inauthentic). Here are some areas where marketing automation can be applied:
Social Media
Any lawyer would say that networking helps them get reliable leads. And that applies to social networking as well. Social media is an excellent way to attract new clients. However, it does take a lot of persistence and time to build up an audience online.
Also, neither you nor the rest of your team likely has the time to create new content and post it on your platforms simultaneously every day. Thus, automation tools are used to schedule content for weeks or even months at a time so that marketers can focus on more pressing issues.
Social media scheduling tools are pretty standard now. Popular ones like Hootsuite allow law firms to plan to pick up the dates and times they want the content posted on and the platforms they want to post to.
This allows law firms to be active online and gain a large number of followers in due time. It also allows them to create opportunities daily to create conversations online and have their content shared.
Email Marketers
Law firms in particular benefit most from automating email workflows as they generally use this medium regularly to connect with clients, current and prospective. Instead of sending the same email out to your entire subscriber list, automated marketing emails allow marketers to personalize each person’s experience.
A simple example would be how a client who downloaded an informational booklet from your site can be sent a thank you email after a few days, including other links with more information regarding your firm.
This allows potential customers to feel more engaged and may consider you when they require your services, whether soon or way in the future. You will be setting yourself up as an authority figure and developing trust with clients.
Chatbots
Do you know what the most popular automation trend of 2020 was?
Chatbots!
They can help enhance your firm’s customer engagement efforts and make them have a better experience.
AI And Machine Learning
When it comes to emerging tech, AI and machine learning are predicted to grow in popularity and effectiveness in the future. This tech allows firms to collect info relating to their clients to develop better marketing strategies and campaigns for the future.
Firms leveraging AI and machine learning alongside automation software can make their campaigns much more effective and successful.
Pay Per Click Marketing
Pay per click (or PPC) marketing is essential for every law firm to include within their lead gen strategy. Carefully select the most popular PPC ad platforms such as Microsoft Ads, Facebook, YouTube, Google Ads, Twitter, and Instagram.
Marketing automation tools for law firms can adjust real-time bids, so PPC professionals can make informed decisions using factual data instead of keyword lists. PPC automation also allows marketers to send personalized messages as click-through rates and quality scores improve.
Custom Alerts
Most reporting platforms and CRM systems allow marketers to create automated alerts based on the criteria set. For example, once the first email is sent, it’s imperative to send a follow-up. So, through your CRM, you can easily automate reminders, so you don’t forget to contact prospective clients.
Automated Event Management
Law firms often host networking events. However, with automated event management, they can now organize events on the fly without all the stress involved in planning. For example, you can use pre-made templates to create invites, have them sent out to all the guests, and have the technology send out reminders about the event.
This allows you and your staff to spend time focusing on the actual event instead of all these little things.
Automate Reviews Requests
One significant part of marketing automation tools is that you can set a template for specific triggers. For example, once someone has completed a legal procedure with your firm, you can automate an email to be sent out asking for a review.
This will double as a way to market your services to others further and complete a fundamental administrative task without putting in too much effort.
In Conclusion
With the abundance of technological tools available nowadays, online marketing is accessible, especially for high-intensity and stress fields like law. When utilized properly, they can significantly increase your marketing strategy’s effectiveness and efficiency.
Now, law firms don’t have to waste time sending out emails, manually posting content on social media, or converting leads, as marketing automation tools can help them do that within a few clicks.
