Podcast Ep. 131: Positioning Law Firms for Growth: How a Sector-Based Strategy Leads to Greater Client Success

In this episode of the Legal Marketing 2.0 Podcast Guy is joined by Dominic Ayres, a senior client development manager at Eversheds Sutherland. Dominic is responsible for the development and growth of international client relationships and sector strategy for the Industrials sector group across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Dominic joins us to discuss how a sector-based strategy leads his lawyers to greater client success. Tune in to learn how firms can identify the best sectors to focus on to stimulate new growth and the marketing tactics that work to support sector-based strategies. You can connect with Dominic on LinkedIn.

Podcast Show Notes

How does a sector-based strategy help a firm to position for growth?

At its core it’s all-around positioning, being relevant as a brand and better connecting with your clients. Having that sector-based strategy really helps you position your law firm. A lot of law firms will say they have a sector strategy but unless you really embed it, invest in it, implement, and repurpose across your firm then clients won’t fully get that value. 

How can a firm identify the best sectors to focus on to stimulate new growth?

All this sector-based strategy comes back to is focus. It really starts with a segmentation strategy, so you really need to deep dive into your existing clients, look at the type of pitch opportunities or the work that is coming into the firm, and that should help you understand where your clients belong in terms of an industry sector, type of size business, or where they are geographically based. From this, it will then really help you to start identifying where you have your strengths already. Also, there’s fundamental factors such as, assessing the competition and looking at the needs of your clients. You really need to start speaking with your clients deeply about their needs and where you are servicing those clients. If you have a list of your top clients generally that’s a place where a lot of firms will want to start because that’s where they’ve already got their headline client names that will help them develop more clients.

What kind of technology do you use to support your work? How do you keep track of the campaigns you’re doing and decide what to focus on?

We focus on technologies that will enable our lawyers to create constant relevant content for prospects. For instance, Zoom webinars.

As far as research technologies, we subscribe to Reuters and other publications that have intelligence on the specific sectors. Also, we’re huge fans of LinkedIn, because it’s more than a CV. We gain client intelligence from LinkedIn. We see what people are writing about and commenting on and that helps guide our strategy. 

Is focusing on key accounts an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy?

Definitely, it’s become an evergreen in other sectors. ABM is very much moving away from “spray and pray” and the approach is about segmenting the prospects that you’re trying to target. Just creating something that’s relevant for one jurisdiction or one practice area doesn’t work anymore, you really need to have various kinds of touch points with your clients and having a solid ABM strategy really helps. Whenever we push out content we will use paid LinkedIn ads and target that specific segment. You can narrowly target right down to the details of a job title, company name and where they’re based in the world.

How does this type of strategy allow a firm to get closer to its clients?

When you focus your strategies around where your clients currently sit – their industry, what they do, and the size of their business, you’ll have a better understanding of their needs and challenges. This understanding will help firms create something of real value within their marketing and business development outreach.

Takeaway

Sector-based marketing and business development strategies enable law firms to build strong bonds and relationships with their clients and prospects. Dominic suggests leveraging sector-based marketing strategies, such as account-based marketing (ABM), because such a strategy enables law firms to then narrowly target prospects with personalized content and messaging geared towards their needs and their specific interests.

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