What You Need to Know About Marketing Automation
A sophisticated marketing plan has many tactics. Attracting and retaining the attention of legal consumers is time consuming to manage.
Marketing automation is one of the best ways lawyers can ensure consistent communication with prospective clients while continuing to provide top-quality service to existing clients. Here’s what you need to know about marketing automation for law firms.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Simply put, marketing automation is the use of technology to handle some repetitive tasks and get the most out of your marketing efforts. For lawyers, automation can be especially beneficial. Instead of devoting hours of your day to manually sending emails, responding to chats, or other tasks that cost you valuable time, you can have them done automatically. You’re still marketing your firm, but you can devote the majority of your attention to bigger, more complex needs.
Why Automate Marketing?
There are large and small ways you can automate your marketing processes, and all have some benefit. It doesn’t have to be incredibly expensive or complex. But before you get started, it’s important to understand how marketing automation can benefit your firm. Here are a few reasons why you may want to begin automating some of your marketing efforts.
Reduce workload
Even small marketing tasks can eat up valuable time that could be better spent elsewhere. With automation, you can set up schedules to automatically send emails or post social media updates. Or, if a known prospect clicks on a blog post, you can automatically send them a message with links to related content for more information.
Improve response time
You have a lot to do and might not always have time to devote to nurturing online leads. Automation saves you time and money, and it generates a greater return on investment. Your staff have heavy workloads, important meetings, and a host of other things that might delay or prevent them from responding to a form, chat, or email in a timely manner. However, marketing automation allows your firm to respond to emails, leads, and social media posts immediately, without any human involvement.
Build trust
Marketing automation helps you build your brand and establish a relationship with potential clients before they ever interact with a person. Automation can lead a visitor to your site, provide them with the information they need, and keep a steady stream of communication over time, establishing a sense of trust.
How Can Lawyers Integrate Marketing Automation?
Now you know that marketing automation can save you time and provide you with some substantial benefits. So, how do you integrate it with your current marketing efforts? Let’s take a look at a few strategies you might consider.
Set up an email drip campaign
Email is one of the cheapest and most effective digital marketing tools available. If a potential client visits your site and fills out a contact form, you can design an automation campaign to send a series of emails based on the information they provide.
Using marketing automation software, you can design email templates and set up a schedule that automatically sends engaging information. The software will also keep you informed of everything that’s going on with automated reporting, so you don’t forget about those emails and what they’re doing for you.
Encourage engagement with a lead magnet
A lead magnet is a marketing tool that helps generate leads by enticing them with something of value in exchange for their contact information. Examples include e-books, whitepapers, resource guides, or special discounts.
What matters most is that the lead magnet is relevant and useful. When someone provides their details and hits submit, the resource automatically shows up in their inbox thanks to marketing automation.
Deploy a interactive response mechanism on your site
On site chat isn’t just for customer service. Many businesses have started to embrace it to help drive sales and convert leads. One of the greatest advantages is that chat functionality enables potential clients to contact you at any time -day or night – and get the information they need. You, in turn, receive additional information about your prospective client above and beyond what appears on form fills. Chat comes in the form of live chat or chatbots, powered by artificial intelligence.
Manage leads with CRM software
As your client base grows, keeping track of everyone can become difficult. Customer relationship management (CRM) software makes the process easier. Using a CRM platform, you can build a comprehensive database of past, current, and prospective clients with all of your interactions noted. Many CRM platforms integrate with other marketing automation software to make marketing even easier.
Automatically request reviews
One of the first places people go when they need a lawyer (or almost anything else) is the internet. Once they find law firms that provide the services they’re looking for, they read reviews. Reviews can have a significant influence on a prospective client’s decision to choose your firm.
Not only can you use marketing automation to automatically request reviews, some platforms can also help you manage the ones you receive. You can flag negative reviews for follow-up, route positive ones to review sites, view responses, and respond to them all in one place, which saves you a lot of time.
Build Your Automated Marketing Framework
Marketing automation tools provide significant benefits for businesses, including law firms. Automating your repetitive marketing tasks doesn’t have to be an expensive headache. Implementing even a few strategies saves you a lot of time and effort, allowing you to focus on what matters most—your prospects and clients.
