Marketing Automation: a Strategy for Mastering Law Firm
It is a never-ending loop.
Small firm attorneys work 40 percent of their time on administrative duties instead of representing clients. It is impossible to wish away duties like completing intake forms and drafting legal documents. However, that leaves little time for marketing, which lowers billable hours and yields fewer qualifying prospects.
Many attorneys wish this dilemma could be resolved. We are here to inform you that automated marketing for law firms does exist! Without necessarily adding staff, outsourcing, or working after hours, you can develop a strong pipeline of qualified leads with the aid of the correct marketing tools.
All you need to do is be willing to try different things until you find the strategy that works best for you.
This blog post will teach you how to select the ideal software for your requirements and set up marketing automation at your legal practice. Let’s get going.
Firstly, what is automated law firm marketing?
Automating time-consuming processes like following up with leads, setting up meetings, starting campaigns, and more is done by law firm marketing automation. You can, for instance, configure an email autoresponder to answer to any new questions that arrive in your inbox automatically.
Nor is that all. Moreover, it can monitor SMS messages, emails, and posts on social media. Mapping your client journey is all that is required. The most significant benefit is that it uses data analytics to find areas where your legal practice may expand. Not an easy task!
AUTOMATION OF LAW FIRM MARKETING: BENEFITS
Automating marketing for law firms offers small businesses various benefits that might help them grow or optimize their operations.
Boost reaction time
Customize your answers.
Optimize content performance and strategy.
Increase marketing budgets
- Accelerate reaction times
Your chances of winning over new clients increase with the speed at which you reply to new inquiries. The majority of law firms respond in less than twenty minutes. To be fair, most small legal firms find it to be a tall assignment. It’s likely that the prospect will have moved on by the time you respond.
By automatically responding to emails and completing lead forms, marketing automation helps close the gap. That prepares the groundwork for more in-depth dialogue and comprehension of their requirements.
With the help of SimpSocial’s range of solutions, you can make sure that prospective customers are engaged from the outset by sending them personalized welcome emails automatically in response to triggers. No more dropped calls!
- Customize your answers
It is possible that you were the first to answer a question that was asked. If the reply was a standard “Thanks for getting in touch with ACME Associates,” however, you’re not having the maximum effect. 72% of individuals will only reply to messages that appear to have been tailored just for them.
Your communication should ideally mention them by name and make a passing reference to their circumstances. Scaling up this process is possible with the correct automation. AI chatbots and copywriting tools, for instance, are able to provide amazingly contextual answers to consumer questions. Even fundamental lead qualification tasks can be completed by them before a lawyer enters the discussion.
With SimpSocial, you can use a variety of filters and automations to divide up your contacts. You may send more individualized, customized messages with higher conversion rates by using segmented lists.
- Make content strategy and performance more efficient.
One of the main causes of low engagement and poor conversion is misaligned material. Prospects will leave your website if they are unable to locate the solutions to their questions. It takes time and effort to customize content for various consumer personas and sales funnel stages.
You may spot gaps in your current content, identify hot keywords, and expedite the generation of content for channels like social media and websites with the aid of marketing automation. You may decide which goods and services to market based on your audience’s preferences thanks to comprehensive consumer data, behavior analytics, and other resources.
SimpSocial provides you with an overview of multiple important parameters through a range of visual dashboards.
- Expand marketing initiatives
Small legal companies struggle with the decision of whether to grow into new market niches or hang on to their current clientele. They frequently wind up doing neither. You can now consistently scale customer acquisition and retention with marketing automation.
A variety of marketing solutions are available from SimpSocial to assist in turning leads into paying customers. To improve client retention, you can also send re-engagement emails, upsell and cross-sell, and perform customer data analysis.
WAYS TO GET YOUR LAW FIRM STARTED WITH AUTOMATION IN YOUR MARKETING
Marketing automation for law firms needs to be in line with your overarching business objectives. Here’s how to set up marketing automation step-by-step:
Specify your goals.
Perfect your brand and distinctive selling point.
Draw a workflow map.
Select the appropriate tools for marketing automation
- Identify your goals.
Assume for the moment that you wish to raise the conversion rate by 10%. If the majority of potential customers who schedule a meeting don’t show up, you might be drawing in the wrong kind of leads. Selecting the appropriate KPIs and metrics is essential to identifying the core reason.
For instance, response rates, website bounce rates, and email unsubscribe rates. A high email bounce or unsubscribe rate suggests that you should do a better job of segmenting your leads.
- Perfect your distinctive value proposition and branding.
Law companies typically require assistance in order to stand out in a crowded market. It might be necessary for them to clarify their niche. That could have an impact on how they present their special selling point. More significantly, this may have an impact on channel preference and lessen the effects of marketing automation.
Thinking like your target audience is the key to strengthening the positioning of your company. Consider their requirements and compare them to your area of competence. After that, summarize it in a single sentence.
An employment attorney who focuses on determining an applicant’s eligibility for an H1B visa is one example.
- Diagram your process
It’s now time to examine the everyday jobs and regular routines that your staff completes. Sort those tasks according to priority and assign them to the corresponding phases of your sales funnel. This ought to clarify the significance for you. Sort the jobs based on rules and those requiring human involvement into two distinct groups now.
Draw attention to the jobs that take longer to do and typically contain the most faults. This method should assist you in identifying the jobs that need to be automated.
- Select the appropriate instruments for marketing automation
Make sure a marketing automation solution has all the functionality you need before purchasing it. For instance, if you intend to send reminder and confirmation messages for scheduled meetings, the solution should support bulk messaging. Verify if the solution can integrate with your current tools, such as your calendars and CRM.
Enumerate your campaigns based on funnel stages and brainstorm how to automate tasks in a way that maximizes productivity and efficacy.
THE TOP 4 MARKETING AUTOMATION TECHNIQUES TO EXPAND YOUR LAW FIRM
Now that you have a strategy in place for implementing marketing automation, consider implementing these recommended practices:
Program follow-ups
Use SMS messages in addition to emails to boost the open rate.
Real-time recording of client interactions across channels
Utilize real-time data to enhance efficiency.
- Program follow-ups.
A typical workflow for an inquiry starts as soon as it is received and includes lead acquisition, data collecting and analysis, welcome emails, and follow-ups. You may even incorporate a hand-off to sales.
You can automate this entire process from start to finish with marketing automation platforms like SimpSocial.
This is how. Based on the data that leads provide, dynamic lead capture forms can ask for the appropriate information from them. Additionally, they may directly sync data to your CRM or lead management system from a variety of channels. You can see your lead generation efforts all in one location thanks to this.
Next, your finest lawyers can be automatically assigned to the leads that automatically score the highest, based on who should be contacted first. Whether to send out welcome emails in advance of or following a lead’s scoring is up to you. Your marketing objectives—conversion or engagement—will determine everything.
The proper call to action (CTAs) in the welcome emails should clearly state your value proposition and include your contact details. The majority of programs include a variety of editable email templates that work well.
- Use SMS messaging in addition to emails to boost open rates.
You would have identified the precise pain issue of the client if you have done a good job segmenting your audience. This implies that you can tailor your follow-up plan to their requirements. However, you can use the same email for all personas and journey stages.
You may send a broadcast to every member of your database using dynamic emails, and you may include changeable content, such as subject lines, according to behavioral trends and demographic information. To boost the open and engagement rates, you may also run email campaigns concurrently with SMS advertising. Reminders and confirmation messages can be sent with this combo.
- Record client communications in real time across all mediums.
Assigning and classifying queries takes hours, when you may connect all of your lead sources to one database? Incoming messages can even be forwarded to the appropriate team member if you have rules in place to identify and classify them according to their source.
Lead data is gathered by marketing automation software from a variety of sources, such as social media, web forms, email, landing pages, and more.
Tracking codes can also be used to assign leads to websites or email campaigns. Last but not least, even when you’re on the go, you may configure alerts to notify you whenever you receive new leads!
- To maximize performance, use real-time reporting.
Real-time data is necessary for law firm marketers to support their ROI estimates when presenting to management.
To make number crunching easier, marketing automation platforms include standard reports and dashboards. They are able to extract data and create charts and graphs based on lead generation, conversion rate, channel performance, and client demand.
This makes it clearer how to tweak what doesn’t work, enhance what does, and come up with creative ideas that can provide you an advantage over rivals.
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