By Gina Eliadis, Director of marketing and business development, Goodell DeVries
A prospective client receives your firm’s newsletter. She gets 12 issues per year, but she only reads the articles on employment contracts. Months go by, years maybe, and the prospect has read four of your articles. One day, she is moved to visit your website. She pings the author’s bio. She looks at your “Employment Law” page. But then her phone rings. She moves on to something else. She closes her browser and goes home. Your firm is forgotten. For now. Or for a long while. You have no way of knowing how close she was to contacting your lawyers. You may not even recognize her niche interest in employment contracts.
Do you ever wonder how many leads surface, just barely, only to slip away into the shadows of your marketing data? Or how much actionable intelligence is hiding in the statistics that your technology platforms are continuously collecting?
One of the many promises of artificial intelligence for marketing and business development is fast, large-scale, high-quality data analysis. Using machine learning algorithms, an AI tool can continuously process enormous sets of data quickly and accurately, and with astonishing granularity. It can not only identify patterns, anomalies, and correlations but also contextualize its findings.
Few, if any, of us legal marketers are trained data scientists. Few, if any, of us have the time and resources to study terabytes worth of statistics. We leave much on the table when it comes to extracting value from our data. Giving this job to an AI platform promises to yield better results and enable more strategic decision-making.
AI-powered data analysis is already baked into some familiar marketing tools. Google Ads uses AI to analyze landing page content and ad copy to suggest additional keywords and other elements for campaigns. Hubspot Service Hub gathers and interprets qualitative data – customer feedback and company mentions, for example – to create a brand’s reputational analysis. And of course, major retailers customize a user’s online shopping experience by drawing on the user’s browsing and purchasing history.
Now, consider all the different kinds of data compiled by a law firm. There are certainly digital marketing statistics aplenty, but also raw figures for individual matters, staffing, practice group productivity, billing realization, and much more. It’s challenging, if not impossible, to mine such a large trove of data efficiently. Yet we may be overlooking a goldmine of insights.
Speak with your marketing technology vendors to ask how their products incorporate AI analytics. Seek out technology consultants who can recommend solutions. Stay plugged in to the conversation happening all across LMA about the value, opportunities, and challenges AI may pose to law firms.
