Firm marketing impacted by covid-19

Law firm marketing has been made more difficult because of covid-19 and business strategies have changed considerably, a report has revealed. 

However, LexisNexis also found that covid-19-related issues were the main challenge for more than half of the 168 law firms surveyed, according to its latest global marketing and business development survey. 

The report said: “Cancelled or postponed client work, delayed payments, video conference meetings, and new court procedures all wreaked havoc on law firms.”

‘No growth’ firms were particularly hard hit – almost 80 per cent were negatively impacted compared to just 10.9 per cent who saw a positive impact. 

High growth firms invested more in marketing and business development and intended to continue doing so, projecting a 38 per cent increase in marketing spend in 2021. 

The report found that almost 7 in 10 firms were successful in their marketing drives and the majority of all firms (almost 80 per cent) said marketing is important their strategic direction. 

The report revealed that firms rank data quality as the top challenge in successful marketing efforts, reflecting the fact that law firms increasingly recognise the value of metrics. 

Firms with the highest growth last year were, according to the report, four times more likely to use tracking metrics for marketing and business development efforts.

Email marketing was revealed to be the top tech tool for almost three quarters of firms’ business development, followed by customer relationship management analytics and content management. 

The report says with email marketing becoming increasingly the accepted method to generate and nurture leads, “the marketing database becomes extremely important”.