Five Marketing Automation Best Practices to Save You Time

A significant aspect of marketing? Connecting to the emotional wants and needs of a target audience.  

And that’s why many lawyers, with their fact-based arguments and focus on rational thinking, may not have a natural knack for marketing.  

Add in the American Bar Association’s rules governing ethical advertising (not to mention the fact that marketing isn’t exactly a billable task), and it’s easy to see why many firms do the bare minimum when it comes to marketing. 

But it doesn’t need to be this way—especially when you use automation to your advantage.  

Barriers to effective legal marketing 

Ethical considerations aside, there are several barriers that solo, small, and medium-sized law firms face when they try to improve their marketing. For example: 

• Lack of funds, expertise, and time 
• Lack of a clear strategy and goals 
• Inconsistent outreach 
• Misunderstanding the target audience 
• Prioritizing leads over thought leadership 

The most common marketing mistakes made by firms—thinking you understand your target demographic and marketing needs without doing the necessary research—are directly tied to these hurdles.  

Luckily, automated marketing technology can help you leap over these hurdles like an Olympic athlete (without an Olympic-sized investment).  

Five ways to maximize your marketing spend with automation 

Marketing is as much a science as it is an art. It doesn’t matter how creative or catchy your campaign is if it isn’t reaching the right audience with the right information at the right time. 

And instead of worrying about how your content will land in front of the right eyes at just the right moment, you can leverage the power of marketing automation to run your campaigns at optimized times (without taking your focus away from other high-value tasks).  

Of course, marketing automation can’t do everything for you. But if you do it right, automating your marketing strategy can increase your revenue while simultaneously reducing your workload. 

Maximize your automated marketing spend by following these five best practices.  

1. Have measurable goals 

Starting a marketing campaign without goals is like baking a cake with a recipe that’s missing a few steps or ingredients. Sure, you’ll end up with something. It might look okay, and it may even be edible, but it won’t be what you had in mind when you first started sifting flour and cracking eggs. 

The same concept applies to your marketing efforts. Ask yourself what specific results you want. Do you need more clients from certain industries? Do you want to be a thought leader? Are you hoping to break into a new practice area? Do you want bigger clients or cases?  

Once you know what you want your marketing to do, set a SMART goal, i.e., one that is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and trackable.  

For example, if your goal is to increase revenue, you could set a goal to add x dollars from new clients by the end of the next quarter. If you want to be a thought leader, your goal could be to have someone from your firm invited to speak at a conference or write an opinion piece by the end of the year.  

Your chosen goal(s) can help you determine the content of your marketing outreach. 

2. Know your audience 

Everyone thinks they know their audience, and almost everyone is surprised when they collect the data showing who their audience actually is.  

This is because many people mistakenly use the terms target audience and target market synonymously.  

Here’s a quick example. As an intellectual property attorney, your target market might include tech companies. Your firm specializes in biomedical device startups, but an analysis of your sales funnel reveals that the majority of your new clients are B2C SaaS companies. 

In this example, your marketing strategy is only partially effective—it’s bringing you new IP cases, but it’s not bringing you the cases you want. This information can help you decide if you need to shift your practice focus to a new area or if you need to make your marketing more specific to issues in biomedical IP. 

3. Track the customer journey 

A customer journey, also known as the buyer journey, is the process your clients go through from initial interest to a successful end result. If you don’t manage this journey effectively, you may end up losing clients and cases that would have been a great fit for your firm. 

When you map and fully understand your client’s journey, marketing automation can help you find and close the information gaps, weed out clunky processes, and improve ineffective responses.  

For example, if your leads drop off during the consideration phase of the customer journey, implement email drip campaigns with valuable case studies or testimonials to bolster your credibility. If leads that sign up for free consultations fail to show up, automate text message reminders to stay top-of-mind so they’re less likely to forget about their appointment.