Note: this post was originally written by Angela Petros.
Russ Fradin, CEO Dynamic Signal recently presented B2B Marketing Trends to Watch at the Brand Innovators B2B summit in NYC. His top 5 were:
- Employee advocacy and social selling
- Content Marketing
- Mobile and consumerization
- Big Data
- Agile Marketing
It got me thinking, what are the opportunities for CMOs at Law Firms to leverage these trends? The low hanging fruit might be #1 and #2 (his presentation is embedded nearby).
Many law firms I know have not yet found the right balance between marketing owning and policing social channels and having their attorneys build their own reputations through various types of social media. I do think there is an opportunity for marketing to set some key messages and themes that they want communicated and let attorneys communicate those themes in their own voices. To focus on driving coherence between the different voices not aiming for absolute consistency.
Content marketing has long been a standard tool in the law firm CMO toolkit, it has just been called “thought leadership” before content marketing became a buzzword. Newsletters, industry updates, case studies, all standard law firm marketing fare sent from marketing departments to companies on various email or mailing distribution lists. This has had varying levels of effectiveness because glass buildings don’t buy legal services, people do.
To drive greater impact, CMOs might consider person to person marketing. How do you enable your partners to provide timely and relevant content to a client or prospect. Are there ways to make this easy for them by building bite sized pieces of content and making it easy for them to send out to their LinkedIn connections or Twitter followers? Sure, getting fee earners to do anything non-billable is a battle – but perhaps there is a win-win here – making it easy for partners to build their own personal brands and along the way the firm brand.
If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
3 Steps To A Better Budgeting Process For Law Firm Marketers