I'm excited to be flying out to "The Big Easy" (New Orleans) on Sunday afternoon to attend the Legal Marketing Association annual conference 2018. We attended last year in Las Vegas and it was great to see the different approaches (and the similarities) to legal marketing and business development either side of the Atlantic.
The biggest thing I saw was the thirst from Senior Marketeers and Business Development people to learn about and understand the latest tech in legal marketing. They went from stand to stand with a genuine interest in learning and bringing back the best ideas to their Partners the following Monday morning.
I'm also looking forward to speaking at the event alongside James Grandage, the Global Marketing Technology Manager from the law firm and Passle client Maples.
We're going to be looking at how senior experts in organizations buy from trusted partners and how to implement an expert-to-expert marketing strategy to win new business and build relationships with the clients that matter.
We have seen this approach particularly resonate with knowledge-rich, time-poor lawyers. There is only so long busy lawyers will sit and write a blog post that simply goes up on a website or be a passive social media user. If they can not see what is in it for their own personal ambitions or indeed how it is impacting on real business growth then they will not engage in the long term.
We have seen over the last few years that when lawyers see the impact then they will engage in writing insights, using LinkedIn and sometimes even Twitter!
But they need to see the impact, they need the regular feedback that tells them their efforts are contributing to business growth - and Marketing and Business Development have a key role to play in providing that vital feedback. Do that, and the impact can be phenomenal.
Looking forward to meeting up with lots of our clients and start to build relationships with our clients of the future!