3 Quick Ways Mautic Makes Your Law Firm Marketing Better
After a 12- or 14-hour day spent interpreting complex laws and structuring intricate transactions, a lawyer simply doesn’t have the time to develop and implement an effective marketing plan for his own business.
And even if that lawyer did find some extra time to work on building a better business, it’s hard to argue with a desire to focus on billable activities, rather than “wasting time” on marketing tasks that may or may not bring in more clients.
Fortunately, there’s a way to make your law firm marketing better, attribute ROI — so you know which marketing strategies are worth your time — and spend more time on billable tasks.
The solution is marketing automation.
Why is marketing automation important for law firm marketing?
Lawyers and law firms can no longer sit back and rely on existing clients to pay ever-greater bills, or for new clients to appear through referrals or direct contacts. Every law firm in the current competitive market will either thrive or fail as a function of its ability to implement a smart marketing plan and develop its business.
Marketing automation offers a system by which lawyers can implement effective foundational marketing strategies without the need for a full-scale marketing team.
DemandGen did a study showing roughly three-quarters of marketing automation users see between a 10 and 30% increase in sales opportunities. But there are more benefits to marketing automation for professional services than leads and sales:
- Better lead management
- More effective multichannel marketing
- Fewer campaign human errors
- Improved email marketing
- More accurate targeting of prospects and customers
- A lessening of time-wasting, repetitive tasks
While there are clear benefits to getting started with marketing automation, it’s difficult to find a solution that works for law firms’ specific needs.
Mautic’s open-source marketing automation solution is the ideal system for lawyers who need an easy to use solution with little to no overhead.
How to Improve Law Firm Marketing with Mautic
The specifics as to how a lawyer would use a marketing automation platform, like Mautic, to improve his firm varies based on differing markets and goals, but let’s illustrate three quick examples:
1. You are a lawyer in a small or mid-size town and you offer criminal defense, estate planning, probate, or residential real estate services.
If you rely on local residents to find your firm through a simple internet search, even with good search engine optimization, your marketing attempts could fall short and you may end up lost in the crowd of search engine results.
With marketing automation, you can implement a social media marketing campaign that appeals to clients in your targeted geographic and practice areas.
Integrate that campaign with a contact management system to grab information about each person that sees, clicks on or mentions your firm's social media presence. You can then use email marketing to send regular messages about your firm’s service offerings.
2. You are an attorney in a large corporate firm in a big city.
You compete with other large law firms across the country to appear on the first page of internet search results, and you know that few people go beyond the first page of results of typical internet searches.
Instead of trying to outbid competitors with search ads, try inbound marketing.
Your firm can develop its own content or farm that content out to professional marketers and copywriters.
Once you publish content, the benefits of marketing automation really start to surface. As the content builds momentum, the firm will gather data to see what works and what efforts are falling flat. It can then reposition its marketing to focus more on the working pieces, which builds even more momentum.
3. You offer very specialized legal services and you just won a major victory for a client in a critical case.
You want to broadcast news of that victory beyond your current client base to increase referrals to your practice.
Use marketing automation to broadcast a blog post about your victory across every relevant media platform and measure and record click-throughs and response rates. You can use that information to connect with interested parties and make targeted presentations to prospective clients.
Why should law firms try Mautic?
Let’s first take a look at one of Mautic’s biggest strengths as a marketing automation solution: it is an open-source platform.
Open-source solutions stay at technology’s cutting edge by facilitating collaboration among developers, rapid prototyping of new concepts, and a community-oriented development strategy.
Each new iteration of Mautic’s underlying engine and source code expands every account holder’s capabilities. Open-source collaboration has also produced a user-friendly and intuitive user interface that will appeal to even the most technology-challenged lawyer.
How does law firm marketing improve with Mautic?
Mautic’s open-source marketing automation software product allows any size law firm to control and manage a marketing plan with a minimal initial investment.
Many law firms attempt to minimize their marketing expenditures by purchasing products that handle only one piece of a marketing plan. Mautic allows law firms to design and implement a complete plan that combines multiple strategies to present a consistent image across several platforms to market its services.
Social Media Marketing
Mautic’s marketing platform allows every size law firm, from solo practitioners to large partnerships, to broadcast consistent messages to existing and potential clients with keywords, hashtags, and mentions in social media news stories.
Contact Management
Mautic’s simple three-step setup process enables you to set up a marketing account in less than five minutes. You can then immediately use that account to track and record leads and known contacts with metrics that show you how long a contact remains on a your firm's website, what pages of the site they find interesting, and what other interests they might have that the lawyer can satisfy.
Email Marketing
Most lawyers use regular email mailing lists to connect with actual and prospective clients. Mautic’s technology makes it easy for them to port this strategy into a Mautic-driven marketing plan. A marketing plan developed on Mautic’s platform will present email messages that coincide with other parts of a law firm’s social media marketing and contact management.
Target Marketing
Lawyers can use a Mautic-driven marketing plan to design forms that they can use to collect client information and interests. That information can later be used for webinars and other more targeted marketing events.
New Services
Mautic’s platform is the perfect product to manage campaigns to generate business for new or expanded services. The platform can be used to generate reports and metrics that give lawyers a clear picture of the effectiveness of a new service marketing campaign.
Big businesses, education, institutions, and governmental entities are turning to marketing automation to manage leads and execute important day-to-day marketing tasks that are otherwise time-consuming.
SImilarly, law firm marketing is no longer what it used to be. Legal marketing requires more precision, more personalization, and more valuable interaction than ever before.
For this reason, marketing automation is essential for law firms.
