Podcast Ep. 52: How Will GDPR Affect Legal Marketing?

Today, Guy Alvarez discusses GDPR and the challenges and opportunities it presents to marketers at law firms and legal services companies. Listen in for an overview of the major changes this new privacy policy will have on legal marketers as well as several suggestions for using GDPR regulations as an opportunity to strengthen the relationship between law firms and their prospects and clients.

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Shownotes

For legal marketers the past two weeks have been hectic in order to prepare ready their firms to be GDPR compliant. In a recent blog post we spoke about what GDPR is and how it will affect marketing in general, but in this podcast we will highlight how it will have a significant impact on the way that law firms are marketing themselves.

The Biggest Change

The main change surrounding GDPR is the concept of implied consent – the idea that individuals have given your firm consent to send them marketing email communications. Today with GDPR, implied consent means that individuals must give your law firm specific consent to receive each type of marketing communication.

What can law firm marketers do to get that consent back?

A recent article from Law360, discusses the unexpected opportunities that GDPR has presented to law firm marketers. By now, most law firms use social media, but they still primarily rely on email alerts. However, with the introduction of GDPR, expect this to change. Law firms shouldn’t abandon email, but they will need to find different methods of getting individuals to give law firms permission to email them

Here are three ways to collect emails while remaining GDPR compliant:

SEO. If you put effort into optimizing your website and blog posts for search engines, they will be easier to find and will attract more people to your website. Ensure that your content is not text heavy – it must be client-centric and easily consumable with a call to action to users to take the next step.

Lead Magnets. Once you attract visitors to your site, you must provide content with additional value. Lead magnets can range from webinars to eBooks to free audits. They are free, educational pieces of content that your audience will find valuable and more importantly they’re gated. This means that they must provide enough value for clients and prospects to be willing to give you their email in exchange for it.

Social Media. Thriving blogs, microsites, and lead magnets can all be promoted and then found by a large audience on social media. In addition to organic social, paid social has become an important component of a digital strategy because you have the ability to target individuals by job title, age, and location.

Takeaways

While GDPR will initially be overwhelming for legal marketers, it can also be a chance to explore marketing techniques other than email such as SEO, lead magnets, and social media. The key is that once you get that permission from an individual, you need to keep getting permission. GDPR compliance underlines the importance of trust in digital client relationships. In order to maintain that trust your law firm must be respectful of your target in terms of frequency, relevancy, and privacy of emails in order to maintain long lasting client relationships.