Charlie: Welcome to the CMO Series Digital Masterclass, a new sub-series of the CMO Series Podcast where we discuss best practices in building world-class digital platforms for professional services marketers. I'm Charlie Knight and to kickstart the series I'm joined by Sam Page, Marketing Director here at Passel. How are you doing Sam?

Sam: I'm doing great thanks Charlie, it's nice to be on the the other side of the microphone. 

Charlie: Yeah it's good to have you on, a bit surreal, but good nonetheless. So today we're going to dive into why creating a strong digital presence is vital for firms in today's market and the first steps to getting started. So I guess to kick off the series, it would be good to understand a bit more about what is Digital Masterclass and how did it come about?

Sam: Yeah, thanks. It's a really, really interesting evolution of where the CMO series has come from. So Digital Masterclass, for starters, just to introduce what it is, it's a sub-series of the CMO Series Podcast. So the CMO Series Podcast, we started a few years ago. I think we're up to 150-odd episodes now, and I've had over half a million listens. That series really came out of professional services marketing having really different priorities and really different challenges than counterparts in other industries. If you work for Boeing, you have a different set of constraints and challenges and best practice than you do if you work for Latham & Watkins or Cravath or someone like that. So the best practice and how to succeed in a professional services firm, whether that's a law firm or consultancy or accountancy, the best practice isn't as widely known as in other industries. So what we wanted to try and do was bring the knowledge from those people who were succeeding, who did know about their particular area and who were pushing the boundaries of that best practice and establishing what's going to succeed in today's market. We wanted to bring that knowledge and help everyone drive the industry forward together. And by sharing that knowledge, we hoped that we would help people be more successful in their roles and we would help law firms develop more successful marketing functions as a whole. So that's the purpose behind the whole series. But as we started talking to people about what mattered and what their priorities were, we saw digital come back time and time again as a major issue and something that people are really challenged by. Earlier this year, we undertook a set of research where we talked to 200 Managing Partners and senior marketers at law firms to find out their core challenges and the biggest things that are keeping them up at night and digital was the thing that came back as being the number one priority looking forward over the next five years and so having talked to so many people throughout the podcast and then having this data to back it up that digital was so important we thought that we would expand the podcast the CMO series and shine a light or put a microscope just onto digital and create a place where best practice for building your firm's online presence and succeeding in digital marketing. That's where the best practice for that is going to live as part of the CMO series. You'll see it as episodes like this where they're relatively short, they're focused on a particular aspect of digital marketing, but it will still be within the CMO series podcast brand.

Charlie:  Fantastic. Thank you. And just going back to that research you mentioned, that's part of this new report, Legal Marketing Leadership Report. So that's available now at Passle.net as part of Digital Masterclass. So that's freely available to download. Just kind of following on from that, you know, you've talked quite in depth about, what the series is all about. What else could people expect from the series?

Sam: In our time doing the podcast, we've interviewed a lot of CMOs, directors, but we've also interviewed a lot of really senior technology partners and consultants who work within law firms and contracted on helping them build a website or build a digital presence or build an online marketing strategy. So what we are trying to do with this series is encapsulate that knowledge from both within the industry and from outside experts and bring that knowledge into a set of podcast episodes, but also blog articles and white papers and even the research report that you just talked about. Bring all that best practice into a place where if you're embarking on a new digital product project or if you're trying to reassess, re-evaluate the way your firm goes about building its presence and positioning itself online, then this is a place to come for that. We're hoping that the advice that we give is a step above what you would normally get from generic advice that might be a position towards other industries. I kind of mentioned earlier that professional services have really different priorities and challenges. That doesn't just play out when you're thinking about marketing projects that are offline. That also plays into everything. When you think about building a website or establishing a strategy for online, you have to take into account all those constraints that come with a partnership model that professional services firms will often have. So we're hoping that this advice is really targeted towards professional services, is really tailored towards what works in an authoring setting. We ask questions like, how do you get buy-in from your partners? How do you make sure this is something that maintains a firm's long-term reputation? How do you make sure this is something that lawyers at the firm can engage with and something that potentially is relevant to the talent game as well? If you're thinking about a website, you need to be attracting talent into the team, into the firm, which is a big part of it. So we're hoping that we explore dimensions like that of topics that there's a lot of maybe generic advice out there we're hoping to dig down and make it really relevant to law firms and consulting firms.

Charlie: Excellent and what's the best way for people to stay in the loop on Diigital Masterclass? 

Sam: So for those that are subscribed to the CMO Series Podcast you don't need to do anything different the episodes of the digital masterclass will drop into your inbox exactly the same way as a normal episode of the CMO Series Podcast does. You'll expect to see those once a month or slightly more. For those that aren't subscribed to the CMO Series podcast, you can do that anywhere where you find good podcasts. So that's Spotify, Apple, Amazon, a host of other places. Podbean is a good source too. If you are not conversant or you're not familiar with the podcast platform, you can always go to blog.passle.net and subscribe there. And then the episodes will come into your inbox as soon as they're published.

Charlie: Wonderful. Thanks, Sam. So the next episode we have coming up on Digital Masterclass is all around placing thought leadership at the heart of your online brand. So we're going to hear some clips from some of our previous CMO Series Podcast guests on their kind of best practice advice on how to do that. So looking forward to that one.

Sam: Yes, it should be an exciting episode. So thought leadership is the second priority that law firms had over the next five years. So it'll be interesting to see how they combine and the advice from people within the industry of how to do that and how to succeed online with the thing that separates your firm from other people, the thought leadership of your experts.

Charlie: Well thank you, Sam and as I  mentioned you can subscribe to CMO Series Podcast in all of the usual places or visit passle.net/digitalmasterclass for all of the latest best practice content we'll be publishing through this new sub-series. Thank you all for listening.