As a part of the Legal Marketing Association’s partnership with Above the Law, each month we’ll share a roundup of insights and intel from Strategies & Voices, the online trade journal dedicated to the craft of legal marketing.
Spanning the LMA’s Body of Knowledge domains for Marketing Management and Leadership, articles in this edition help legal marketers with several initiatives.
Launch New Services
Legal marketers can and should play a leading role in their firms’ introduction of new services. In Legal Marketers: Your Role in Developing New Services, readers will learn key steps of a strategic process for evaluating and launching new offerings.
Key tip: Engage your clients through interviews, surveys and focus groups to ensure your new services meet and exceed client expectations.
Learn Your Style: Leader or Manager?
“Leader” and “manager” may be used interchangeably, but they actually represent two very different approaches to guiding a team. The infographic Leadership vs. Management: Determining the Right Approach for Your Team provides some clarity using four key questions:
- What are we setting out to do?
- How do we deliver results?
- How do we make it happen?
- What are the outcomes?
Key takeaway: Leadership can be summarized as “doing the right thing,” while management can be distilled as “doing the thing right.”
Link Competitive Intelligence to Firm Strategy
Competitive intelligence professionals are often asked to help with specific and tactical projects, such as analyzing a potential client’s litigation portfolio. But leading law firms are starting to incorporate this function into strategic planning or practices, industry groups and even the firm as a whole.
In How Competitive Intelligence Can Support Firm Strategy, three senior legal marketers share examples of strategic projects where CI played a part; discuss the elements of CI that apply best to strategic planning; and provide guidance on presenting CI data in the strategic planning setting.
Key takeaway: Avoid the “massive data dump”; when presenting research findings, provide firm leaders with user-friendly executive summaries that highlight the most actionable information.
Leverage Your Technology
This month, Strategies & Voices also shared the results of the 2024 Legal Marketing Technology Ecosystem Study conducted by LMA and RubyLaw. This provides law firms of all sizes with benchmarking on technology use as well as perspectives on how martech will evolve within the legal sector.
The primary output of the study is a Legal Marketing Technology Stack Blueprint, which charts the “prevailing systems and tools used by legal marketers.” It’s a helpful reference as firms enter budget season this fall.
Key takeaway: The survey shows the adoption rates of various technology tools in law firms. In 2024, popular tools have included:
- Content syndication
- Customer relationship management
- Alumni portals
- Sales enablement
- Marketing automation
- Talent management
- Social media publishing
- Data enrichment
What’s on the decline? Search and social, accessibility and compliance, and search engine optimization.
In the months ahead, the LMA’s Strategies & Voices will shift to focus on Client Service.
Do you have a compelling case study about your firm, or marketing insights to share? Share your ideas with Strategies & Voices today.
Katherine (Katie) Hollar Barnard is the managing partner of Firesign | Enlightened Legal Marketing, a communications agency for law firms and legal service providers. She also serves as co-chair of the LMA’s Strategies & Voices editorial committee.
