Improved Productivity Gives Legal Marketers Time to Strategize

If law firms aren't actively nurturing prospects and turning them into new clients, they will face big barriers to growth. But this is easier said than done. According to the 2020 State of US Small Law Firms, 26% of firms said acquiring new clients is their biggest challenge.

But legal marketers can’t focus on implementing new growth strategies if they’re bogged down by inefficient processes. Improved productivity is paramount to growth. 

We recently found that most (80%) professional services marketers waste at least a quarter of their week on tedious, repetitive tasks. This further accentuated this already clear need for efficiency. 

Legal Marketers' Top Challenges

Law firm marketing, along with marketing other professional services, requires a different strategy than B2C marketing, or even B2B software marketing. The “product” isn’t quite as simple to package up in a pretty bow and push to the masses. Marketing to the legal industry requires very targeted and niche messaging to be able to connect to the ideal audience. 

And more specifically, law firm digital marketing is more complicated due to professional conduct rules regarding the promotion of legal services. 

They must create strategies that allow them to:

• Attract clients according to the firm’s specific areas of practice with targeted messaging.
• Remain competitive with similar firms by identifying and promoting their differentiators.
• Generate and follow up with new and nurtured leads.

The common theme here: extensive and well-informed strategy work.

Time to strategize and work towards an effective legal marketing strategy is often stolen by menial and repetitive tasks. These tasks have little impact when compared to strategy work, but they end up being major time sinks. 

One of the biggest culprits is tombstones. While generating a presentation of relevant tombstones - or a display of previous experience - is an effective way to turn leads into new clients, it quickly steals more time from your team than is worth it in the long term. This process is full of inefficiencies that detract from legal marketers’ ability to deliver the expertise they were hired for. (Not to mention potentially souring your employee experience).

Why Creating Tombstones Manually is Inefficient

Tombstones are promotional tools that contain text in a simple box with a centered headline and text lines. 

And while it may not be a graphic- or image-heavy asset, they can contain a lot of information, including:

Names of the lawyers, firm names, contact information, areas of practice, bar memberships, former employment positions, juridisctions, licenses, military service, languages spoken, payment options and more. 

All this information generally lives between multiple types of software like Access, SharePoint, Excel and other disparate sources. 

It takes hours to manually create a tombstone. 

For a law firm marketing team, the process can look something like this:

• Respond to a request for transaction information.
• Search multiple databases for proprietary client information.
• Fact-check the information.
• Copy, paste and format the information in Word for the tombstone.

These hours that legal marketers spend checking, copy/pasting, and formatting is time that they cannot spend doing the work that matters.

Monotonous tasks like tombstone creation are not worth the time of a savvy marketer. 

A single point of access for this information is a game changer. And a tombstone management solution trims this task down to minutes instead of hours. Data enablement tools like Pitchly pull all the data needed for tombstones from disparate sources and give you a single workspace to work in. This gives the marketer their time back to spend on strategy work. 

But productivity considerations don’t start and end only with tombstones. 

Better Software = Improved Productivity

Beyond tombstone creation, there are a range of other tasks that rely on accessing data efficiently. 

A well-organized database and experience collection process easily produces consistent, detailed data about client activities. You can access these credentials at the click of a button. 

Pitchly – designed specifically for law firm marketing teams – cuts down the time it takes to aggregate data for tombstones, proposals and pitches. Data used to create tombstones exports directly to PowerPoint via detailed searches that use easy-to-navigate filters.

Data Management for Non-IT Teams

Databases like SQL Server, Access and even MongoDB, are all great to store data. But they were made for IT teams. They were not created with your front office staff, client administration, business intelligence, executive leadership, or marketing and business development in mind. 

An SQL query locates the data. And then a middle step is required to export the data. Then the data probably funnels into another spreadsheet. Or you spend big bucks to create a custom interface that likely won’t scale with your firm. All of this time and money taken away from strategy work.

Implementing an experience database allows business development teams to input new transactions, register recent league table submissions data and search and export tombstones for proposals. The software can migrate and consolidate transactional practice group deal records into permission-based cloud software. 

Using a process like this not only saves time, but improves consistency and quality of information. This ensures that you maintain a high quality of data.

Pitchly Improves Legal Marketers' Processes

Getting time back to focus on your marketing strategy can really be as simple as choosing the right software. When you let your software carry the burden of your data, you realize the true abilities of not only your marketing team, but your whole firm. 

Pitchly is easy to use, so it's easy to maintain data consistency across different departments at your firm. The key is that everyone has access to one master deal data source. Business development teams are easily notified about new deals as soon as they come in. And marketing can present a standard template for tombstones, proposals and pitches.

Data Security

We protect your private information from release. And knowledge lives at your firm, mitigating any loss from attorney turnover. You can also share information internally to promote greater awareness of firm experience and services, while promoting client and business unit successes at the firm executive level.

Pitchly saves firms time creating tombstones, proposals and pitches. This allows law firm marketing teams to focus on strategy and other big picture initiatives. 

Professional services firms use Pitchly to record information about their experience to better advise and market to clients. We makes it easy to distribute, audit and manipulate this information while automating transaction tombstones to market firm experience easily. Customers can migrate an existing proprietary database or create a new proprietary deal database in minutes. 

Ready to learn more?

Want to see how an actual Pitchly customer benefits from our data enablement tool? 

Tune into our client story below to hear firsthand from Mary Beth Olson at Hinshaw and Culbertson.