Hello, podcast listeners! Welcome to this week’s episode of LISI’s podcast, All The Things. In this week’s One More Thing episode, co-hosts COO + CMBDO, Robyn Addis, and Director of Marketing Technology and Operations, Dan Martin delve into the importance of meaningful data and its role in enabling executives to make informed decisions that directly affect their firm’s bottom line. Furthermore, we will explore effective strategies for presenting digital analytics to law firm leadership. Be sure to give it a listen!

  

Robyn:

Hey podcast listeners. Welcome to this week’s episode of LISI’s All the Things podcast. Today we are discussing the importance of collecting and presenting critical digital marketing analytics for law firm management. Having the right analytics is the most crucial aspect of making data-driven decisions. Digital analytics provide valuable insights into how clients interact with your website, marketing campaigns, and other online assets. By presenting this data effectively, you can help law firm leaders understand their target markets better, optimize their resources, and ultimately drive growth. We’ll explore why it’s essential to have meaningful data and how it can help executives make informed decisions that impact the firm’s bottom line. So let’s dive in and learn how to present digital analytics to law firm leadership effectively.

Hi everybody. Robyn Addis here, chief operating officer and chief marketing and business development officer at LISI. I am joined today by my esteemed colleague, Dan Martin. Say hi, Dan.

Dan:

Hey, Robyn. How’s it going?

Robyn:

Good, how are you?

Dan:

Good.

Robyn:

So for our loyal following, you are going to be familiar with the fact that this is our once-monthly podcast exclusive episode of All The Things. And this month Dan and I decided to change things up a little bit and have a conversation about something that he and I find very exciting, which is law firm marketing analytics. And I am not being sarcastic. We actually, in a very nerdy way talk marketing data and analytics for fun on the regular.

Dan:

Yes, yes.

Robyn:

But Dan posed an interesting question to me not too long ago. How could we talk about marketing analytics from a law firm leadership perspective, which is what we’re going to talk a little bit about today. I’m going to ask Dan to sort of give us a little bit of a background in terms of what are we actually talking about when we talk about platforms and the analytics and what is the data that we can get out of it? And then we’re going to talk about what law firm leadership is actually trying to understand, which many of us probably know what they’re trying to understand. But I want to talk about a little bit of a different way to approach the conversation from a leadership perspective based on my experience. And like with all conversations where I get a little bit nerdy, God only knows where this is going to take us. Right, Dan?

Dan:

Exactly.

Robyn:

Okay. Dan, talk to us a little bit about the importance of digital analytics and what we’re talking about.

Dan:

The genesis of this idea was Robyn, you and I have worked together in a previous life at a large law firm in Center City, Philadelphia, and I always thought it was interesting how you were close to leadership. You were getting their feedback on what they wanted to see, and you were coming to me and the people on my team saying, “How can we get the answers to these questions that leadership is asking?” So that’s how I wanted to frame it. What is our website doing for us as a law firm? How are we getting leads? What is our S.E.O. efforts doing for us? What is our email campaigns doing for us? All those legal alerts that we send out on a regular basis, are they actually moving the needle in terms of getting new clients or improving our relationship with current clients? What is our webinars doing for us? Is that getting us more clients? Is it improving current relationships? So that’s the genesis of the idea and the framework that I wanted to operate in today if that makes any sense.

Robyn:

Yeah, totally. Yeah. And I mean the interesting thing about those conversations… And even in preparing for this podcast today, Dan and I had this chat a little bit too. The interesting thing is that from my perspective in a leadership role and as a participant in those leadership-level conversations, yes, those are the questions that they’re asking, but are those the right questions? Right? Are those the right questions and do the answers to those questions actually give actionable intelligence and information that can help us pivot and change strategies or make informed decisions moving forward? So I’ll get into the weeds with that in short order here, I’m sure. But let’s talk a little bit about from your perspective. So Dan, as you said, we worked together at a law firm previously, and now I’ve brought you over to the dark side on the agency life. But you have a lot of experience with marketing, digital marketing, data, and analytics. I mean, for goodness sakes, you just got your MBA in digital marketing or master’s in digital marketing, what, last year or two years ago?

Dan:

Yeah, I graduated December.

Robyn:

Right. So as nerdy and as excited I might be. You’re really committed to it.

Dan:

Yeah, for sure.

Robyn:

So talk to us about, just sort of level set. What are some of the key analytics and the K.P.I.s that you find most valuable to track and why?

Dan:

So I think that’s question requires a little bit of unpacking in terms of what are the tactics that we’re doing? Because then, so let’s say for instance, if we run a law firm, Addis Martin Law Firm and we want to do S.E.O. search engine optimization-

Robyn:

Thanks for putting my name first on that, by the way.

Dan:

Well, you know, mathematical first.

Robyn:

Fair.

Dan:

So let’s say that you and I, we want our firm on the first page of Google. I’m sure you’ve heard that before, “We want to be on the first page of Google.”

Robyn:

Yeah.

Dan:

So we would do search engine optimization, and for that particular one I might look at, okay, where are we ranking for specific terms? So let’s say our law firm was a personal injury firm, so where are we ranking for terms like, “Personal injury lawyer Philadelphia,” or where are we ranking for terms that are important to us? That’s one that I would find valuable in terms of presenting up. Another one would be how are people getting to our website? It’s great that people who know us and refer clients to us, they already know us, they probably have us bookmarked or they type our address into the address bar and their browser. But I want to see that organic traffic growth. I want to see the people that don’t know us or don’t necessarily know how to get to us immediately. I want to see that organic traffic growing month over month and year over year and things like that. So you’re lessening the people that are directly coming or the people that are bookmarked and you’re getting people who have found you because you’ve written good content, because they’re finding your attorneys via videos that you’ve posted that are being indexed by Google and things like that.

If we’re talking about something, if we’re going to run a pay-per-click advertising campaign, search advertising campaign, for our law firm, certain metrics might be what’s our return on ad spend or what’s the average C.P.C. that we’re spending? Are we getting enough impressions for the amount that we’re spending? Are we always showing in the top? Are our competitors showing above us more often, what’s the percentage split there? So those are examples of different, I would say channels and then metrics underneath or K.P.I.s underneath those channels, you could uncover. I’m sure we could do an entire four-part series on, “Here’s this specific marketing channel, and here’s our tactics, and here’s what the K.P.I.s should be.” But I don’t want to spend two hours of everybody’s time going into the weeds on that.

Robyn:

I am, Side note, Dan and I also have a conversation sometimes about what’s the right length for a podcast. I would argue that a really meaty dive into a topic is what I would prefer, but agreed, I don’t think our audience is here for two and a half hours of data nerds. Right, Dan?

Dan:

Yeah. Exactly.

Robyn:

Well, okay, so we’ve got a lot of information and ideally we have access to a lot of data that’s coming out of the different platforms and tools and so on and so forth that we use. Where I think it transitions from information and results to more of answering the questions that leadership is really looking for, is being able to take a step back from that data and see the forest for the trees, as I like to say. And I joke sometimes that I can look at a spreadsheet, rows and columns of data and text and numbers, and it’s like that scene from a beautiful mind where he’s looking at all the numbers and it’s sort of just pops out at him. I so enjoy doing it and I do it so much that I can start to look and see the trends or if I pivot on the data, what is that really telling me?

That’s the first question. What is the data really telling me? I know you hear me ask this question all the time, and what is it indicating? Is it validating my expectations or sort of my theory, or is it telling me something, am I discovering something new? And that gets us to, there is this big question, and you teased on this a little bit in terms of some of the metrics and the K.P.I.s, but really law firm leaders want to know if there’s a return on their marketing investment. I’ve had this conversation a lot over my career. R.O.I. especially for BB firms can be this, I called it once in a presentation the great white whale of marketing. It’s like Moby Dick, right? It’s very elusive. But in order to identify marketing R.O.I., you have to identify specifically what are the data inputs that you are calculating, bringing into the calculus, and then put that through the R.O.I. formula to sort of see what it results in.

I do have a very specific example, and this is talk about a great white whale or a unicorn or whatever mythical creature you want to talk about. At the firm where you and I both worked, with one of the groups with whom you worked frequently, they did a webinar that resulted in a client acquisition. So we were very easily in this one case able to identify, “Okay, here’s all the attorney time and their billable rate. Here’s all the attorney time that went into preparing for this webinar. And here is the…” Basically that was it. It was really just time and prep preparation because there weren’t other external costs. And then calculating that against the projected revenue from the engagement and from the client and able to identify the R.O.I. That is my very favorite example, but I always like to give that with a huge asterisk, that is so rare because as we know it’s time and it’s… Developing a business relationship with a client in any professional services industry does take time and multiple touches to actually get there. But okay, I digress. I’m going down a rabbit hole.

But here, here’s the biggest thing that I want to talk about. And Deb Ruffins, who is… I believe her title is the chief marketing and business development officer, and I believe she’s at Perkins Coie… I’m going to double-check that before this goes live. She gave a presentation at the Marketing Partner Forum back in January, and part of that was talking about leading and lagging indicators to help us identify firm performance. And so I want to talk a little bit about that because I think that’s a great place to… If we’re saying the question of this podcast is, what are law firm leaders really looking at to help them make business decisions? I think those leading and lagging indicators are a great first place to start.

So starting with lagging indicators. So those are some of the things that you had mentioned. A lagging indicator is an output measurement, it reports past results of the efforts that have already taken place. And this happens to be where I think a lot of leaders tend to focus, but they can take a long time to shift, lagging indicators can take a long time to shift. They can be hard to attribute to specific advanced actions. So law firm leaders might ask questions like, “How much was produced? How many people attended the event? How many people are R.S.V.P.’d?” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But lagging indicators are triggered by some event that has already occurred and are typically measured against marketing K.P.I.s. So that is where, that doesn’t mean that this information’s wrong to look at, but I think that where you shift from a performance sort of measurement outlook to a leadership strategy outlook is then the shift to leading indicators.

And I’ll finish my monologue in a second, I promise. But a leading indicator is a predictive measurement so a leading indicator provides a benchmark when if it’s met, is indicative of your ability to meet the K.P.I.s you’ve set. So for example, law firm leaders might ask questions like, “What systems or processes can I implement to achieve the goals to leading to more predictable success? What can I make happen today? What organization can I set up today or infrastructure so that we have the tools and resources that we need in order to be able to measurably increase our revenue, ultimately? What are some of the skills that the team can improve to achieve the results we’re looking for?” And leading indicators are the day-to-day business activities that lead to the goals. So they’re what drive business performance and success and make future results more predictable.

Okay. So Dan, it’s funny, I’m going to admit that when you and I were talking about this, it’s not something that I think is commonly discussed, especially in law firm marketing departments. Right? This was sort of a new term, new phrasing for things that we’ve certainly talked about. But to think about them in terms of leading and lagging indicators. Don’t you think?

Dan:

Definitely a different kind of language to speak about. I’ve heard an analogy of this saying, think about if you’re in a car, you’re lagging indicators are what’s in your rearview mirror, and your or leading indicators or what’s out in front of you through the windshield. So the past versus the future.

Robyn:

Yeah, that’s a great analogy. Yeah, that’s a great, great, great analogy. I should have just let you give that first. And when I think about that, I think about some of the strategic conversations I’ve had. I mean both at LISI with some of our clients, but certainly at the Am Law firm where we both were, what are the best resources and technologies that are going to be able to help give us the tools and information we need to be able to more effectively engage in business development strategies or marketing strategies to bring in interest and to attract new clients?

And here’s where I’m going to say too, and I wanted to say this at the outset. Here’s the thing, I will never argue with a lawyer, or a firm or lawyers, whatever, who say the biggest source of my business development is my referral network and my relationships. I % agree with you, and I’ve said this on multiple different podcasts and presentations on multiple different topics because it all comes down to ultimately how are we creating more at bats for the attorneys? And so yes, I believe I agree with you, Mr. or Ms. Attorney, that your business development is coming from your referral network. But what we are trying to do, and the leading indicators we’re trying to look at are what can we set up for you or what processes can we as a marketing department implement so that it is more efficient for you to get in front of those referrals, your network, so on and so forth more frequently, thereby creating the opportunities that give you increased business development opportunities. I’m rambling at this point, but do you-

Dan:

No. Yeah. I agree. I think referrals will likely be the top for most lawyers, law firms, whatever it might be, but I always like to add, it’s great, let’s keep those referrals. How can we improve that process? Whatever that might be. But how can we get additional business that maybe isn’t through referrals? Think about all the other ways you could possibly get business. And yeah, that’s something that leading indicators could help with in terms of, if we tweak this here, we could get other business this way, or whatever it might be.

Robyn:

Yeah. So let’s talk about a couple specific things. I know S.E.O. is certainly your baby, at least as far as here at LISI. So what are some of the leading indicators? If we’re talking about a focus on search engine optimization as a strategic priority, what are some of the leading indicators that law firm leaders might look at and what are some of the lagging indicators that we as marketers might look at, but also might be presenting output data to firm leadership?

Dan:

Yeah. Certainly. So some of the leading ones, so what’s ahead of us are how can I improve the amount of content that I’m putting out? What’s the content production process look like? Do I need to improve the amount of time the approvals take? Do I need to get more writers doing this? Do I need to filter it down to associates to write out the first draft and then up to the higher-level partners and things like that so that the production process is a little bit faster? Because content at the end of the day, is what’s going to help move the needle on SEO because you can have a website, but with no content on your website, Google’s not going to index it. That’s a whole another story for another podcast.

And then another one might be like, okay, what are our online competitors doing? So the Addis Martin Law Firm, we might know that LISI Ackerman is a competitor of ours, they’re right down the road, or they might be across the building in Center City. But when somebody pulls up a Google search, Google doesn’t determine your competitors like that. Google determines your competitors by who’s talking about the same things that you’re talking about. So you might be an insurance attorney or something when you Google something related to insurance, articles from something like State Farm or Farmer’s Insurance might come up. Those are technically your online organic competitors because they’re talking about the same subject matter that you’re talking about. And S.E.O. is about subject matter and content and things like that. So those are two leading indicators, if that makes sense.

Lagging indicators, I like to get a set of keywords from the law firm lawyers and say, “Okay. Here, I did the research on what your online competitor’s doing, what keywords I think you should be ranking for. Here’s a list of let’s say. Can you whittle this down to  that you think are really important to you that when you type that search firm term into Google, you want to see your firm ranking for?” So when that list is exchanged between me and the law firm or the lawyer, we start tracking that. So in month one, we might be on page two, but as we make SEO improvements and meta descriptions on-page S.E.O., all that other stuff… Tracking that month over month, how we going from spot on Google, which is page two, to can we get to spot eight? And then can we get to spot four? Can we get to spot one? So it’s tracking that month over month, so you can sort of see, “Okay, I’m moving the needle in terms of the terms that are important to me and getting higher in those Google’s search pages.” Because as we touched on earlier, everybody says, “I want to be on the first page of Google for everything that my law firm does.”

Robyn:

Yeah.

Dan:

That’s sort of how I approach S.E.O. and one tactic of how you would look at leading and lagging indicators. But let’s do another one just to further illustrate the example and solidify in our audience’s mind here. So let’s talk about integrated marketing communication campaigns, Robyn. At LISI we offer outsourced legal marketing services and we do a lot of things for a lot of different clients. But in terms of leading and lagging indicators for marketing communication campaigns, what would you say some of those might be?

Robyn:

Yeah, I mean the biggest one in terms of, again, looking through the windshield, looking at what’s coming down the road towards us, how much time does it take from concept to completion? And actually this might be the one that I focus on exclusively for this because if we’re thinking about an integrated marketing communications campaign, I’m not talking like SCOTUS releases a decision and we write a legal alert, that’s fine, that’s a great thing to do. I’m talking about we have set a strategic goal of growing a specific practice, and so what are all of the communications components and digital marketing tactics that we need to weave into the strategy and deploy in a integrated way to help drive broader brand awareness and ultimately create opportunities like I was talking about before, for existing or new contacts and potential clients to discover the service and the firm.

So concept to completion time is a big leading indicator of how successful a firm can and will be in terms of executing this strategic goal. And I use this one because it’s a big thing that a lot of firms are talking about all the time. Whatever the firm is focused on, how do they continue to expand their practice and/or add a new practice and continue to increase their market share? Right? That’s what every firm’s trying to do right now. And I would argue that a huge leading indicator of their success in achieving that goal is how much time it takes them to actually say, “Hey, we’re going to do this. We want to build a marketing campaign to support this and actually get it off and running.” Because we in this industry are very good at overcomplicating things.

And if it is something that the idea happens and it’s sort of blessed by whoever needs to approve the moving forward with it, but it takes us four to six months to actually get something off the ground, we are losing ground every second. Every sort of minute that goes by is wasted time, as opposed to if we can create a waterfall project management approach or strategy to, or agile or whatever the right… Sorry. As opposed to if we could create an agile project management approach to it where we are executing and refining in an iterative and combined way as we go forward with it. So that is one way I would say, the most important leading indicator of our marketing strategy is how long it actually takes us to get something out the door.

And then the lagging indicator and related to that, what is the customer acquisition cost? A little bit, again, tying back to the ROI of it, but also what is the revenue growth that we’re seeing coming out of this integrated marketing campaign? So it’s interesting to really think about it from this perspective of leading and lagging indicators because I think if we can socialize… Not just we here at LISI, but we as legal marketers can sort of socialize this concept. I think it’s a really strong footing and foundation upon which marketing leaders can drive the conversation in a way that I think will resonate with the lawyers who are leading these law firms. Because it’s not just about, yes, we got X amount of output and what does that tell us? It’s, if you want to be able to grow revenue, we need the processes and tools in place to do it more efficiently and it has the potential to increase by X percent, even if you’re sort of projecting based on broad industry data. Again, soapbox very excited about it.

So let’s pull this all together and talk about how do we build queryable data in order to get us to that point where we can sort of beautiful mind-style look at the information and sort of extrapolate a story. Why is it important? Let’s start with the why here, Dan. Why is it important to be able to do this, in order to have this data set? And what are the resources… I’m asking a leading question here, but what team is really important for us to be able to collaborate with on this?

Dan:

Well, so I think it’s interesting because we’re talking about these leading and lagging indicators and I hear data points and all the, “Look at this particular data point and tell me how I can forecast that into growth.” All these are data points, which means all these things require data. So these things might be in different systems and some things might be in Google Analytics, some things might be in your C.R.M., some things might be in a random Excel spreadsheet somewhere. Right?

To me, we need to strive as legal marketers and we need to team up with one of my favorite departments at any law firm or company, the IT department, to work to pull all that data together because you know I’m not a huge fan of data being in silos because it just causes more time when you’re data wrangling and pulling everything together in an Excel spreadsheet at the end of the month just to look at it, and then you got to do it all over again at the same time. If you team up with somebody in your IT department, they can help you with that data governance and data handling of, “Okay, can we get…” They probably have a data lake or data warehouse or something they can pour everything into and help you build something that is more easily queryable, more flexible than an Excel spreadsheet, allows you to… Your favorite thing, pivot table and run some queries. And even being so flexible, you can use that to do forecasts and things like that rather than wasting to hours a month pulling all the data from different systems and then it just gets lost in an Excel spreadsheet.

Robyn:

Yeah. I also, big fan of the IT department. Some of my closest professional relationships and friends have come from the IT teams at the firms where I’ve worked. So I’m fully in support of that point, and I will just do a little plug for, I recently contributed an article for L.M.A.s Strategies and Voices online magazine about how to foster communication and build relationships between marketing and IT. Because exactly to your point, Dan, they are the best people, in my humble opinion, to have in your corner in terms of getting the access to the information that you want in order to be able to help you make strategic leadership-level decisions. So, totally agree.

Dan:

Right. Right. They’re good at the IT, they’re good at data. You’re good at marketing, they’re good at IT. It’s okay to team up. You don’t have to do everything.

Robyn:

Well, and I think too, one of the common challenges I’ve seen is… And really this is just to the whole point of my article actually is, the biggest challenge that I see is a breakdown in communication and more specifically sort of a lack of transparency. So I say that my superpower is finding a way to yes. So I come into a conversation in general, but especially with it saying, “Okay, here are the seven things I need to be able to accomplish. What’s possible, how could we work together?” And if initially faced with a wall or essentially the word no, my question doesn’t become how do I work around you? Then it’s, “Okay, what does it look like if we were to work together to make this happen? What is reasonable? How can we actually achieve this?” Because sometimes it is just about competing priorities or competing resource availability and so on and so forth.

Dan:

Certainly.

Robyn:

Right? And again, I’m going down the the rabbit hole of this conversation. But I do think it’s a really valid point because again, coming back to looking at marketing analytics through a law firm leadership lens. If I’m a leader and the answer is, “Well, I didn’t get what I needed from IT,” my expectation is you should have figured out how to get what you need. Right? Figure out how to communicate with them. So just to sort of tie it all together again.

And I will tell you, I know Dan knows this, so in our previous firm we had a data warehouse that was actually built by the executive director, but it was fully queryable and it was all of the time and matter and billing information across the firm. It was obviously very limited in terms of who had access to it. But when we were able to access the information, just pulling out trends and sort of horizon scanning and using it to identify gaps in client service, where were there opportunities? What impact was maybe one practice area having on the ability of other practice areas or service lines to be able to get a toehold into a client? So on and so forth. It was just like, I’m genuinely giddy actually talking about this because it was just so exciting having access to that information, which I have since learned from colleagues at other firms is light years away from what they’ve had access to and it really made a big difference. So just looking at access to data is a very, very critical component of being able to effectively present to firm leadership in terms of marketing analytics.

Dan:

Right.

Robyn:

So if you’re still with us at this point,  minutes in… I would say the biggest takeaways here are, when you are thinking about marketing data… Whatever level you’re at in your department, especially if you are a person who hopes to ascend the ranks within your marketing department… Think about it from, “What is the story I’m trying to tell? What is the big picture here? What are the one or two things that I really need to pull out of this information and craft a story around because it will make an impact on leadership when I present this information?” We haven’t even talked about vanity metrics, and I won’t take us down another rabbit hole. But all that output data I said earlier, it is important, it is interesting information, but it’s not actually easy to pull insights from that in a way that law firm leadership understands like, “Okay, here’s the impact it’s going to make.” And when I say understand, they’ll understand the impact, but the challenge is how long it’s going to take to steer the ship in a new direction.

Whereas the leading indicators sort of what are the efficiencies, the processes, the protocols that we have or need, and what impact will that have on the output and by extension ultimately the things that we’re looking towards, revenue growth and market share, et cetera? So, hey Dan, thanks for asking me to get super nerdy and nobody will ever want to talk to me again. If they actually listen to this, they’re going to be like, “Oh God, Rob is going to come talk about marketing data again.”

Dan:

Yeah. I got to avoid you at all the L.M.A. conferences.

Robyn:

I mean, they pretty much do already. It’s fine. But thank you so much and thanks for, I don’t know, since we’re both sort of hosting this, thanks for co-hosting this with me, Dan.

Dan:

Yeah. Go team.

Robyn:

Go team. Thanks, everybody. Have a great week and make sure to subscribe to the podcast and follow our almost every week live streams on LinkedIn, which are also replayed as podcast episodes. This summer we are doing a best of, our best LinkedIn live streams since we started them early on some point in the middle of the COVID- pandemic, when we still wanted everybody to see our face. We have some really exciting episodes that we’re having fun bringing out of the archives and sharing over LinkedIn again this summer. So be sure to tune into those and follow us on social media and stay connected. Thanks, everybody. Have a good one.

You have been listening to All the Things, the podcast from Legal Internet Solutions Incorporated, where we bring you All the Things, whether it’s three things we learned, hearing from a legal marketing insider, an ask me anything session, or that one more thing we’ve been dying to tell you all month long, but couldn’t, that’s All the Things. Our next episode will be out in a week wherever you get your podcasts, and you can join us for the live events every Friday at  Eastern on our LinkedIn channel for our livestream, where we bring you All the Things live.