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How Law Firms Can Benefit From Campaign-Driven Marketing

by Guy Alvarez • April 12th, 2021 • Digital Marketing | Blog

Marketers working on project graphicYou can’t begin to achieve your law firm’s marketing goals until you clearly define them. Clever commercials or enlightening podcasts will be only that if they are not tied to strategic, measurable goals. Once you define your goals, you can develop a strategic campaign to meet them and measure your return on investment.

What Is Campaign-Driven Marketing?

A marketing campaign is a collection of activities, such as print ads, TV commercials, white papers and blog posts, focused on a particular topic and aimed at a target audience. Many professional service firms employ a campaign-driven marketing approach, in which they identify key business goals for the company and then develop campaigns around those goals. The idea is to home in on very specific objectives, develop a campaign to meet them, and use relevant metrics to determine how the campaign performed to learn for the future.

How Law Firms Can Benefit From This Approach

In my experience, the majority of law firms are not taking advantage of campaign-driven marketing. Law firms typically do not have large in-house marketing departments, and being spread thin often leads them to be reactive rather than proactive in their marketing. When marketing lacks a strategic, specific focus, it’s problematic for two reasons: It’s highly inefficient to market everything to everyone, and without goals in mind, it’s difficult or impossible to measure a campaign’s success. The campaign-driven approach requires firms to look at the big picture — to determine what they care about accomplishing as a business. Once you do that, you can target your marketing efforts more narrowly and track your results more precisely.

Start With Objectives

Let’s say your law firm has several business goals for the year. Perhaps you want to grow one or two of your practice areas. Maybe you want to generate awareness of a new office location. Or there may be hot topics — such as new laws passed by the new administration — that businesses will need a law firm’s services to implement, and you want them to choose you.

Within these broad goals, it’s important to develop more specific objectives, such as generating leads, raising brand awareness among influencers or cross-selling to existing clients, and think about what you need to do to accomplish these objectives. Decide what your campaign’s key performance indicators (KPIs) will be — how you will measure its success — and the budget and resources you will need to carry out the campaign.

For instance, if your objective in a campaign is to generate leads, you will probably want to set up KPIs that enable you to track conversions. However, in order to generate conversions, you will need to create an offer or “lead magnet” for which visitors will be willing to trade their contact information in exchange for the offer.

Creating an offer or “lead magnet” requires a copywriter as well as some design work to make it look enticing. Then you will need the right tools to measure the conversions and probably a data analyst to determine insights you can glean from the data. If your in-house marketing team is barebones, you may decide to extend your resources by using a good outside agency to create content, develop a targeted media plan and analyze metrics.

Craft A Campaign Using Targeted Content

The next step is to identify your target market. If your goal is to expand your employment law practice, for instance, think about who your potential buyers are. Your target may include business owners, in-house counsel, and HR professionals at companies in a certain geographic area, including existing clients who use your firm for other services.

You can then home in on this target with content to engage them at various stages of the buying process. For example, if a new law will have a sweeping impact on employment practices, you can provide blog posts, videos and client alerts to help educate targeted buyers about how the new law will affect them and why they may need an attorney’s services.

As they begin shopping around for a law firm, you can offer free white papers, webinars and e-books to prospects who register to position your firm as experts of the new law. Using prospects’ registration information, you can then move on to calling them and perhaps offering a free consultation or audit of their employment practices as they move closer to the decision-making phase.

Choose The Channels And Measure, Measure, Measure

You need to figure out which distribution channels your audience uses so you know where to reach them. In some cases, social media sites like LinkedIn or Twitter may be most effective, while email may work best for other targets.

Once you determine the channels, you can tailor and format your content appropriately. There is a wide variety of third-party tracking tools available to measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts. Incorporating tracking codes into paid ads and other content and setting up landing pages on your website can allow you to fine-tune your activities midstream.

When you have the right tools and KPIs in place, you can measure many aspects of your campaign to figure out what went right, what went wrong, and what you should do next time.

The Takeaway

If the campaign-driven marketing approach sounds overwhelming, start small with one campaign. By going through all the steps, from determining a goal through measuring results, you can learn what’s involved in each phase while gathering data that can help you with future campaigns.

Is your law firm interested in getting started with campaign-driven marketing? Given that Good2bSocial specializes in digital marketing for law firms, we can help your law firm put together a winning strategy. Contact us today for a free consultation.

This article was originally published on Forbes.

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