Charlie: Welcome to the CMO Series Digital Masterclass. While establishing a world-class digital presence is often associated with hefty budgets and expansive teams, today we're exploring how to achieve online success with a leaner approach. I'm Charlie Knight and I'm delighted to welcome Karen Wilcox, former Head of Marketing at Taylor English and previous Marketing Director at Kilpatrick. With a background in Big Four Consulting, Karen is now President of Marketing Speaks. Welcome, Karen.

Karen: Thanks, Charlie. It's good to be here today. 

Charlie: Yeah, it's great to have you. Thanks for making the time. So, Karen, we're going to talk about your insight on developing and implementing effective digital marketing strategies with a lean team. And hopefully, I'm sure you're going to share loads of best practice advice for firms looking to do the same. So let's jump straight into it. Karen, can you start us off by kind of talking us through what the starting point is when implementing a digital strategy,particularly with limited resources?

Karen: So I think when you have limited resources, it's critically important to know what the end game is. So you're actually going to start at the end rather than the beginning. And by that, I mean, what is your firm trying to accomplish? And if you don't know what the firm is trying to accomplish, because some smaller firms don't always have very clear growth plans in place, what is your managing partner trying to accomplish? And then the second piece I think you want to know is what is your team expected to support? And by that, I mean, is your team expected to support branding? Is your team expected to support revenue generation? Is your team expected to support attorney recruitment? Or all three. because that will make a difference in how much digital branding and marketing you do and how you direct it. And then if you want to tie that back to what your firm is trying to accomplish with its growth strategy, whether that be entering new markets, whether that be maintaining the markets that they're in, will impact on what you're trying to do. So then you go back and then you can start thinking about, all right, what's the content do I want to have? What are the tactics? Where are the platforms that I want to be on? Can I do it all with LinkedIn or do I need to do digital ads? I wouldn't even start talking about any of that until you're clear on what your firm is trying to accomplish and then what you are expected and your team is expected to support in accomplishing those goals.

Charlie: Yeah, some really good points there. I think often I'm sure teams can kind of jump to those tactical outputs and kind of tools rather than, as you mentioned, kind of thinking about what the goals are, the end goals. So, yeah, interesting point. So kind of think about what the end goal is and also the expectations around what your team is expected to deliver. I think that's also a good point, because I think that can be assumed sometimes, but perhaps isn't always agreed necessarily.

Karen: Correct. And I think the other thing it helps you with is when you have attorney come into your office and ask you to do a campaign on something. And if it doesn't fit into the overall strategy, you actually have a leg to stand on as to why the answer is going to be no. Or if it does fit into the overall strategy, you have a leg to stand on on why you said yes to that particular attorney as well. It just helps you manage workflow when it randomly comes in the door.

Charlie:  Yeah, absolutely. So I guess taking a step back, if you're working with digital partners, if you don't have that kind of in-house resource, what should you be asking of those digital partners to ensure that they're the right fit for your team?

Karen: So I think if your digital partner is really going to be an extension of your team, so it's not like they're bringing in a piece of software, you're going to upload it, and then they're going to go away. But they're truly going to be a strategic partner. They're going to be helping you with execution of your plan. I think the first question you want the answer to is, who's my day-to-day person going to be? And you want to make sure that you and your team and that day-to-day person with the vendor all get along. They can be technically competent. The firm can be fabulous as far as what they deliver. But if it is difficult to work with that person, or if it's unenjoyable to work with that person, you're not going to do it. Your team's not going to do it. So you're not going to get full benefit. So that account exec or customer service support person, you want to know who that's going to be. And I would find out as early in the sales process as you can who that's going to be, just to make sure that that chemistry and synergies are there. The other questions I would ask really relate to kind of process and support. And it revolves around what training is my team going to get? What support will the team have? Are we going to have monthly calls? Are we going to have biweekly calls? Can you help me directly with a partner? Can I pull you, you know, a partner at the law firm? Can I pull you into conversations with the attorneys? And are you going to help with idea generation? And from that, I mean… The partners that you're using, hopefully, are also using these services with other professional services firms. It can be a wealth of knowledge of what others are doing and best practices and things that they're seeing that are working well or things that they're seeing that haven't worked well. But maybe if you tweak it a little bit, maybe it wouldn't work well in your firm. There can be a wealth of knowledge on those types of things that we don't get to see because we're so heads down in our own firms. How is that knowledge transfer going to happen? And I think those are really critical questions to have because you do, when you have a small team, the partners that you have can be so beneficial in the execution of your strategy and helping you bring on talent without having to bring on a full-time person to do that. And they can be focused on that activity that you've hired them to do and they don't get pulled into, again, the random request that comes through the door that day. So I think you really want to understand how you're going to work with them. 

The last piece of it is if you're going to have multiple partners, you want to make sure that those multiple partners are going to work well together and that they each understand what their role is on this broader team that you're putting together. And that while they maybe could do something that another vendor is doing for you, you have hired them to do, say, for example, video. And then you've hired another team that's going to help you with graphic design and ad layout and those types of activities and you want to be very clear that vendor A is doing the graphics, vendor B is doing the video and you're happy with that setup but that they're willing to work together where those activities may overlap.

Charlie: Yeah, fantastic. So you kind of talked about the, you know, establishing what the processes and the support looks like and, and kind of, you know, what training will be available and, and what to the catch-ups, you know, the meetings look like going forward with the team, which again, really important, you know, day to day. And also, you know, establishing who that operational contact is, who that, you know, who that person is that you'll actually be working with. Again another great point because I think you know in those initial meetings you might meet the the you know the CEO or the you know the the head of that team but not necessarily the person you'll be working with so I think that's a great point to think about and then just talking about the you know that last point around I guess building those relationships and particularly if you're using multiple partners and kind of how that synergy works and if they work well together and work well with your team. As you mentioned, you know, I like the phrase that you use, they should be an extension of your team. So just kind of diving into that a bit more, what would you say is the key to building effective relationships with your digital partners?

Karen:  So I think first and foremost, you have to be a good client. You have to communicate well what you're looking for, what the project is, what your expectations are, what the deliverable is, what the timing is and be honest about that. There is nothing worse than to get a project and be told it's a rush and then find out later it really wasn't. Don't do that to your partners. You'll never develop that true partnership if you're not treating your partners like you would treat a member of your staff. So you want to be a very good client and you want to be a fair client. But that also means I think you have to let your partner know when you're happy with them and you have to let them know when you're unhappy with them. And the sooner you let them know that you're unhappy, the sooner something can get fixed. If you're unhappy with something, you recognize that the onus may be on you because you didn't give good instructions. You need to own that, admit that, and let your partner know, hey, this didn't work out the way I thought it would, but it's because I didn't give good instructions. And so you acknowledge that you're in it with them, and it's not always going to be about they have to, the partner always has to do a good job, even if you don't give good instructions. I think you have to have that very open communication. take responsibility where the responsibility is yours. I think we also forget sometimes when we're working with our vendors and our strategic partners that at some point. Because we work for a law firm, we are eventually going to have to ask our strategic partners to do something on some crazy timeline. And it's going to be ridiculous. And we are going to need them to help us. If we are a good client, and if we have always been open and have always been fair, that strategic partner is going to bail you out and really help you with whatever challenging situation you find yourself in. If you're not a good client, they're not going to be as willing to help you out. And I think you, so there's a selfish reason as well for wanting to be a good client because it's going to happen. I don't know when, I don't know how often, it's going to vary from firm to firm but you are going to have to ask your vendors to help you out with the ridiculous timelines and if you've been a good and fair client that they will help you with that and they'll do it willingly and it'll be because they are a part of the team and as part of a team we all figure out how to make make it happen and so it all goes back to my first statement uh be a good client.

Charlie: Yeah I love that and I think as you say it's the kind of it's a two-way thing isn't it is being open and transparent from both sides so you can build that that kind of trust and that that relationship of trust with each other so you can have those really honest conversations when they're needed and and like you say you can kind of pull on them when you know when there's when there's a tight deadline or you know you've got things to deliver and you know if you've built that really strong relationship hopefully it'll work both ways and you can kind of work together well to deliver when you need to but yeah great points to consider and some of those kind of soft, what people might describe as kind of soft skills in kind of communication in those kind of situations, I think plays a really important part.

Karen: You're building a relationship. And I have got partners that I've worked with for almost 20 years now because we've built that relationship. Everywhere I go, they're going to come with me because I trust them and I know they're going to take care of me. And that's very important to me.

Charlie: Yeah, definitely. Thank you, Karen. And then I guess, so, you know, talks about building those relationships and working with partners. What does success look like? Can you kind of pull on any real-world examples of how that's kind of culminated in an effective output?

Karen: So I think success, you know, I'm going to get a very lawyer answer here. It depends, right? It depends on what you're trying to accomplish. But for example, at one firm I was at, we really wanted to improve our LinkedIn engagement. And so we decided that to accomplish that, we had to post more often. And we made a decision to post one to two times a day every day of the week. So that's somewhere between 10 and 14 posts on LinkedIn, which sounded like a ridiculous number when we first started. And I think it's one of my prouder accomplishments that we've done as a team because the whole team bought in to the goal. And we also opened up the social media calendar to the entire team, and it became everyone's responsibility on the team to add items to the social media calendar. So, for example, if the manager had an event, it was their responsibility to go into the social media calendar and put any pre-event campaign that they wanted to do, any after-event campaign they wanted to do. And if they wanted to take the speaker's presentation and turn that into a series of thought leadership posts, they were responsible for putting that on the calendar. So even though we had a person who was responsible for posting on LinkedIn. They weren't responsible for coming up with all the ideas for trying to get 10 to 14 posts a week, taken care of. We could have never have accomplished that without the whole team buying in and the whole team participating in content generation for our LinkedIn page. I think that's one of the accomplishments for a small team is recognizing that the digital media strategy is everyone's responsibility, not just the person who maybe has it officially in their job description. I think another example of success is when you start seeing your attorneys actually sharing the content and becoming more engaged with the content that you're putting out there. That means it's starting to sink in within your firm that, again, it's everyone's responsibility from a digital standpoint to have a successful digital media campaign. 

Charlie: Yeah, I think there are some really, really lovely examples there. And I think, you know, getting that buy-in from the team and kind of everyone coming on board with, you know, posting on LinkedIn and taking responsibility, as you say, for kind of generating that content, it really kind of helps the success of that particular campaign. And I imagine, you know, kind of getting some people past that initial fear of posting, because I know that doesn't come naturally to lots of people on social media to kind of post things externally. So kind of bringing everyone in and kind of, I guess, creating a safe space for people to input content that could be shared. And once they start doing that regularly, I imagine that became, you know, more of a habit for them. So, yeah, really good example of how you can kind of pull that resource in to generate lots of great digital content. So I guess, Karen, it'd be great just to kind of finish this episode off with some really interesting insights and great, great tips, particularly for small teams looking to enhance their online presence. But if you had to just pick one piece of advice for a CMO who's looking to build their world-class presence online with a small team, what would that be?

Karen: The one piece of advice I would have is create templates. It's a very simple thing to do, but it saves so much time and it helps with that fear factor of I don't know what to do. I don't know what to post. And by that, I mean, you know, Canva's relatively inexpensive for a year long subscription. Have a graphic designer go in and create templates for your new hires, create templates for your ads, create templates for your out and about posts, create templates for your thought leadership posts. Everything that you want in your digital campaign, create as many templates as possible so that you get over some of those hurdles with someone who maybe is not used to posting digitally or is new to the firm and you want to make sure that they stay on brand and stay on point. That way they're also, whoever's doing the postings, not worried so much about the visuals because the visuals are kind of taken care of and they can focus on the content. And then the other type of template I would build is process templates. I talked earlier about the event and do you want to take that presentation and turn it into a series of posts? Make that part of the event process, you know, how many, so that we start building that habit forming. So where else can you have the philosophy of create once, publish often, and how can you build it into your project management processes that are already in place so that you start building that habit of this is what we're going to do. This is how we're going to make sure because again we only got so many people who can generate content how can we get the most out of that content how can we post it multiple places how can we on a regular basis how can we make sure we're thinking through everything that comes across our desk is there a second opportunity or a third opportunity or a fourth opportunity to reuse this content.

Charlie: Fantastic. Yeah and you know obviously here at Passle we we love that COPE phrase that we use, create once, publish everywhere, as you kind of alluded to Karen so yeah completely agree and I think some great advice to create those templates you know for your artwork and your graphics and then as you mentioned those process templates to help

support kind of creating that content you know further on and kind of reusing content from

events and things are really helpful so yeah some fascinating insights there, Karen. Thank you for your time today and have great day.

Karen: Alright, thanks Charlie.

Charlie: Well that's all for today's episode thank you to Karen so much for coming on and sharing those insights and thank you all for listening to this episode of CMO Series Digital Masterclass. Never miss an episode by subscribing to the Passle CMO Series Podcast on your favourite podcast platform or visit passle.net/digitalmasterclass for all of the episodes and we'll see you next time.