Charlie: Welcome to the second episode of the CMO Series Digital Masterclass. I'm Charlie Knight, and today we're delving into the pivotal role of thought leadership in shaping a firm's online brand. So to kick off the series, we've collated some of the best digital advice from the CMO Series podcast. You can find all of the links to the full episodes in the podcast description. We're going to explore the essential tools and strategies that professional services marketers need to thrive in the digital landscape, uncovering why more firms are weaving thought leadership into their digital blueprints and sharing success stories from industry leaders who have made their firm's expertise the cornerstone of their online presence. In episode 99 of the CMO Series podcast, we went behind the scenes of a law firm rebrand with Erica Roman, the Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer at Cole Schotz. Erica shares the starting point for their digital strategy and the key factors for building a successful online brand.

Erica: The law firm website tends to stand for your identity. It's who you are. If they don't know you, even if it is a credential check, we want to impress them. If somebody is given three names, I want to stand out in some way. I didn't want us to be, you know, a kind of like one of the male looking law firm, I wanted to immediately grab attention. And I think we've become so visual in the world of Instagram, Facebook, our attention spans are incredibly low. So, you know, my thought is lock them in with an identity that's so different, and interesting that it's hard for them to leave. And then pull them in with our messaging, our words, our mission, who we are our culture and so on and so forth so luckily you know the silver lining of something like COVID is that we were running around a bit less right we had other our other initiatives got tabled and it gave me the opportunity to say hey we're kind of stuck at home right now I think it's time.

Charlie: Defining your firm's core message is key to developing an effective brand recorded live at the Legal Marketing Association's AnnualCconference in San Diego, Erin Stone Dimry, Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer at DLA Piper, discusses how they developed their brand pillars to differentiate themselves in the market.

Erin: Well, when we merged, and anyone who's been around long enough will remember, our slogan was, everything matters. It's not very differentiating. And when we step back, we don't want everything to matter. We want certain things to matter. And we want to understand what we're really good at and what we want to do. So the way we went about developing Brand Pillars was really that interview process with our own people and with our clients. We do our own client research. We rely on third party research from a number of sources. And we really wanted to understand what clients valued most about us and what talent valued most about us. And in a firm our size, you can get a laundry list of things. And it can be very easy to go right back to everything matters because by the, time everybody weighs in, you're everything and nothing all at the same time. And so what we try to do is not look at direct statements so much, but what are the underlying themes to who we are and which of those themes really resonate with us. And our leadership was really important in this moment. Our leadership at a firm of our age is made up of people who have built practices on our platform. And they had a really strong point of view about what's differentiating about that platform. And so they were significant drivers of this project right alongside us. And as they brought forward that point of view and we bring in all the other point of views and we start to pull those themes through, some things emerge. And I think it becomes affirming that you start to really realize who you are. And for us, though we're a new firm, we're the result of a big merger. And we have nearly a hundred-year history in West Coast innovation markets. And yet we weren't being perceived as an innovative firm. And we really sat down and said, gee, we've been here for almost a hundred years. We have history with some of the most market-moving organizations that we've advised across their life cycle. We pride ourselves on being a steward of companies and their most impactful moments and their opportunities, their growth. And how are we pulling that through? And so as we develop those brand pillars and we started to really hone in on who we were, the last thing we did, and it's an important piece, was we took an audit of ourselves. And we said, if this is who we say we are, can we prove it? And that's a really… Aha moment, I think, because certain of our brand pillars, we had a lot of proof points. We were deep in what we could say about it. And others, we weren't. And it doesn't mean it wasn't true. And we had to really step back and say, gee, we really do think it's true. We have the experience. We have the expertise. We can point to the client work. But we don't have any awards or recognition. And that's our fault that we didn't tell that story well enough. So doing that audit turned around and influenced our activation. Because we had to look and say, hey, there are certain areas that we know that message has already landed and we're winning. And we built a calendar for the first year. And every PR piece, every event, every piece of thought leadership went on that calendar against a brand pillar or more. And it was confusing in a matrix. And we went through a couple iterations of making it scannable and viewable. But we really we're holding ourselves accountable on a month-by-month basis to say, are we messaging across all five pillars we want to hit? And innovation, we talked about this was one that we had not done a good job really messaging around. And we set that as a priority for last year. For 2023, innovation was a priority for us. And we looked at what was the firm doing that we thought told the innovation story. And we had a really solid story to be told around AI. 

Charlie: Finding the right digital partners is essential for executing a successful website project. In episode 131 of the CMO Series podcast, Noni Garrett-Wall, Head of Marketing at Charles Russell Speechleys, explains how they maintained the integrity of their brand narrative within their new digital strategy.

Noni: To start off even just getting the right agency on board was really paramount and you know we've been really thankful to Huddle creative because they we wanted an agency that was going to be you know bold that they were going to push us to be different but obviously as you say we had some messages that they had to take on board and they were kind of three key things one guess was our new focus on being an integrated international firm so really focusing on the fact that we were international. You know, we've had a lot of international growth. We've recently opened an office in Singapore. I think that was incredibly important to sort of bring to life in our narrative. The second one, and probably the most challenging one, was, as you said, because we were known for private client and we brought in the transactional side, we needed sort of an anchor to articulate that in the market. And for us, that was our focus on private capital. And this can be a bit challenging. Private capital can be defined in different ways. For us, it really is, at its most basic sense, really just describing investments and funding, whether by wealthy individuals, their family offices, into assets and other business ventures. So it's really just that alternative to funds raised by the public markets. But, you know, this really gave us this fantastic anchor to use to bring together that private client and transactional side of the firms. But, you know, we also had to make sure that different areas of the firm could talk about private capital in different ways and ensure that they were confident in that message. And then the third sort of point was or message was really around emotional intelligence, You know, from I think the moment Simon Ridpath, our managing partner, you know, took on that role, I think that was one of the key things he always felt like was our differentiator. Our lawyers were very emotionally intelligent. And that also came through so strongly in our client listening, you know, that our clients are really looking for advisors who will listen to them and then collaborate internally to bring them those best fit solutions. Solutions so it wasn't an easy task you know having to look at international private capital and that emotional intelligence and sort of find that way to differentiate our narrative in the market. 

Charlie: Positioning professionals and their expertise at the heart of a firm's brand it's becoming more and more crucial as online consumers increasingly seek authenticity in the content they consume. Sophie Bowkett Chief Marketing Officer at Bird & Bird joined episode 43 of the CMO series, to share how they humanized their brand, to showcase their people and distinguish themselves in the market. 

Sophie: I think for us, it was about being comfortable stripping away a more corporate mveneer and really celebrating the people that make up our firm and the things that unite us and obviously so represent our brand. And we were doing this work in the pandemic when we were all doing video calls from our homes and experiencing various lockdowns together.

We'll all remember from that time we were connecting with each other in a much more real and kind of human way. And it just felt right to keep that sense alive as we refreshed the brand. And as you've said, you know, more human issues like D&I and ESG are firmly at the top of the agenda internally at our clients, organizations and in the wider world. And in that context, it started to feel very incongruous to have a more kind of corporate brand identity rather than, you know, something that is a bit more personal when we're talking about such human and emotive topics. So we really wanted to bring that human connection alive so one way that we did that was with our strapline it's ‘one firm your firm’ and just having that your firm that real sort of shot of empathy at the end talking very directly to our clients and to our people was just one way of us trying to bring that human side to life a bit more it's such a core focus because of course we're all in a relationship-driven business we want to reflect the human interactions that actually make those relationships more rich and rewarding, rather trying to downplay those by reverting to a sort of stiffer, more corporate expression of the firm. So that was the real impetus behind it, I think. 

Charlie: Involving the firm's partnership in any major project is crucial for its success. Julie Stott took the stage at CMO Series Live in London to share her approach, highlighting how asking the right questions can engage and align others with the project's vision. 

Julie: We all work in a market that is, at times, quite tricky to differentiate one law firm from another. And we've all got corporate partners that think, oh, we all do great deals and we're amazing and we can turn things around. Or, you know, we're great advisory lawyers and we can do that. Well, actually, arguably, everyone in this firm works with lawyers who are great at what they do, right? That's why they are partners in law firms. It's why all of us are working for a kind of top quality firm so the question of what do you want to be famous for I'm not sure anybody would have asked any of the organizations i'd been in previously that question so it stuck with me so there's definite credit there to Greg for that question so as a consultant I'm going around talking to people listening talking to clients and about six weeks in I had a meeting with the partnership board and after I'd kind of given them my assessment of their current BD marketing capability and where I thought they might want to make some changes they said is there anything else and I said well yes actually I've got a number of questions for you but one of which is what do you want to be famous for and there was complete silence it's like a rhetorical question and I was like it isn't i was like I genuinely want the answer right I actually genuinely want and they're like oh I don't really know you know, well I mean we're a great city law firm, I was like yeah so is everyone else and you know I just kept challenging them and what became massively apparent is they had no idea actually, what they wanted to be famous for. And so that kicked off, if you like, the conversation about, well, who are you? What is this firm? What are we trying to achieve? 

Charlie: So that's all for this episode of CMO Series Digital Masterclass. You can subscribe to the series by signing up to CMO Series Podcast in all of the usual places or visiting passle.net/digitalmasterclass. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.