Nicole Keeling
Here at Chronicle Law, we pride ourselves on supporting our partners to grow their brand and generate more business, via the outbound campaigns we deliver for them, which we call our engagement plans; but how do we do this, and do you have the resources to do this yourself?
As part of our aim to support those working within the legal sector, we want to help you in your own marketing efforts with our guide of 7 things to consider when delivering an outbound campaign to reach professionals within the UK legal industry.
Delivering outbound campaigns may seem simple at first. Send out marketing emails, share your posts on LinkedIn…which are certainly aspects of a successful campaign; but getting it right requires thinking beyond that, looking at the details and executing the following 7 critical steps:
1. Data & GDPR
Any successful campaign needs a solid list of data before getting its feet off the ground. High quality, compliant data ensures you’re reaching your target audience whilst most importantly, being GDPR & PECR compliant. What are the main things to consider with your data?
- Accuracy: Ensure your data is up-to-date and verified to prevent a high volume of bounce backs in your campaign. If you have the resource for a team to curate your own list of data, even better! This’ll ensure you can be confident you do not have a list of outdated information. If you are purchasing data from a third-party company, ensure you’re confident that it’s verified and up to date. Sending out emails to ‘dirty data’ can result in being blacklisted, getting a poor domain reputation and even getting yourself into legal issues.
- Break it down: As you’ll have a target audience in mind, you want to make sure you can break down your data and pick out exactly who you want. Consider being able to do this over geographic location, practice area, job titles, and size of firm the prospect sits within. Getting these data fields correct could completely skyrocket your success when sending out targeted emails.
- GDPR Compliant: Most importantly, ensure you’re staying GDPR & PECR compliant. You can do this by ensuring you have clear opt-out routes (such as unsubscribe links) and have permission from the prospects. If you are sending out highly relevant information relating to their business, specialisms and job roles, then this helps. Also, you need a legitimate business reason to be contacting them and make sure you’re contacting them through their business email address and no personal emails. You also want to make sure you are only reaching out to LTD’s and LLP’s. Not being careful with all of the above could lead to some hefty fines.
2. Content
We understand that content is key, and it is the crucial part in portraying your brand’s message, getting your audience’s attention and building up those crucial relationships. To captivate an audience with your content, you should consider:
- Audience focus: Know your target audience’s needs and pain points, it needs to be relevant to them.
- Engagement: Present ideas and ask questions that prompt audience reaction and make sure the topic is relevant to the present market. Could you even include something interactive?
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): You want to ensure your article is appearing in search results so making sure you’re using the right keywords, and optimising your article titles is a must to ensure you’re ranking high on search engines. Ensuring your article is easily readable with clear headings will also support this!
- Visuals: Include relevant and high-quality visuals to ensure readability, this could be images or videos that align with your branding.
3. Partnerships
Partnering with companies is a great way to bolster your campaign, save money, and reduce risks. Building partnerships with other companies brings benefits such as:
Cost efficiency: You can create mutually beneficial contra-deals with partners so that you’re both supporting each other to achieve your marketing goals without the financial cost.
Wider audience: By partnering with other organisations, you will not only be targeting your own market, but the chances are they will be advertising for you on their channels meaning you’re reaching two audiences.
Lasting relationships: When a partnership is successful, this will usually turn into long term business deals not only ensuring you’ll have a trusted partner to work with, but the increased network will often lead to new business and opportunities.
Increased credibility: If an audience can see that other companies are confident in you, then they will be too. Your partner’s audience will have trusted relationships with their clients and if they see you working together, they’ll likely have an established trust in you before you even speak.
4. LinkedIn
When utilised well, LinkedIn is a powerful platform in marketing and can be used to compliment all of the activity across your campaign. Whilst building a larger network and posting regularly is a standard in businesses’, what else can you be doing to optimise LinkedIn?
- Premium account: Ensuring you have a LinkedIn premium account should be your first port of call when conducting a LinkedIn campaign. This ensures you aren’t set back by low connection requests and inMail limits.
- LinkedIn Extensions: Do your research on some of the LinkedIn extensions you can use to increase efficiency. These add ons can be used in a number of ways, such as gathering additional email addresses swiftly and making connections with potential clients easier.
- Content sharing and Engagement: Post and share your content every day, but don’t over saturate your feed with posts because it won’t appear at the top of your connections feed, ideally one post a day will ensure maximum impressions. Ensure you’re also consistently liking and commenting on your networks posts to keep your brand name at the front of people’s minds.
- Build your network strategically: You want to grow your network but you also want to make sure it’s the right people within your network that you are communicating with. Try to stay away from accepting connection requests from individuals outside of your industry that only want to sell to you. Yes, you want to grow your network but you also want quality connections over quantity.
5. Email
Email campaigns are the go-to tool for most people when it comes to outbound campaigns, and that’s because they’re simple and when executed correctly, are successful and an easy way to bring in new leads. When used in combination of all 7 steps within this guide, your email activities will be a fool proof way to generate new business. Make sure each email campaign is accompanied with the following:
Domain reputation: Make sure you are using a warmed up email domain, or a service that allows you to use reputable IP servers. You also want to make sure your DNS settings are all correct. If this isn’t something you are familiar with, I would recommend either doing a bit of research on this beforehand, or using a partner company or in-house professional that understands this aspect fully.
Provider: That nicely leads us into using the best provider. There are many email software providers all claiming to be the best, so it can be tricky to pick one. Look at reviews and comparable websites that will help you make a decision. Also, be aware, if you are looking to send ‘cold emails’, then you will need to use a cold email platform specifically for cold emails. Using a platform such as Brevo or Mailchimp for cold emails can get you kicked off and banned. These platforms are for sending out communication to subscribed contacts only.
Content: Utilise your existing content and make this a focus point of your email. You could incorporate your content into the email, or reference your content leading the audience to your website. This ensures your message is getting out there consistently.
Metrics: Ensure you’re optimising tools to measure your open rates, bounce backs, and click throughs. This will help you to track success and where to improve.
Personalisation: Small details such as using the prospects name, referring to their business name, or mentioning the practice area they work in will make all the difference in an email campaign and reduce the chances of your email being discarded as a generic sales email.
Data and GDPR: Ensure you’ve narrowed down your data so that the email is exclusively going to your target audience and make sure you have an opt-out option to stay GDPR compliant.
Dynamicity: Ensure you’re considering the timing emails are sent and the number of follow ups or prompts. Change your email structure according to the results your email metrics produce to find what works best.
6. Call to Actions (CTAs)
Consider what you’d like to achieve in your campaign and tailor your call to actions to your goals. Ensure all of your outbound activities have a clear, concise call to action. Also, consider what we call ‘stepping-stone’ calls to actions. Building up the relationship can take time and sometimes going straight in to attempt to book a meeting isn’t the best idea. You might want to ask for a less committal call to action first, such as subscribing to your newsletter or attending a webinar.
Here are some call to actions below:
Generating new business: Your CTA can be to set up a meeting with one of your sales team.
Enhancing brand awareness: Your CTA can be to direct the audience to content on your website, to sign up to a newsletter, or to follow your company page.
Promoting a webinar or event: Your CTA can be to sign up to attend.
If you’re looking to achieve a combination of outcomes to your campaign, you can alternate your calls to action throughout the campaign.
7. Telephone Calls
Telephone campaigns often get a bad reputation due to the ‘old school’ cold calling practices sales companies pushed in previous times however, they’re still a proven and highly effective tool and can be conducted in a softer manner whilst also remaining direct. Benefits of telephone campaigns include:
Fast results: Telephone calls do not require you to wait for a reply or feedback as you have got the person directly with you now. If you’re sales savvy, you could have a new client within the first conversation; or whilst it often takes a couple of conversations to close a sale, you will have more visibility of when to expect results.
Relationship building: A real conversation will always be the best way to build relationships and this is an opportunity for prospects to see your personality and buy into you as well as your business. Telephone campaigns often lead to new partnerships and those long lasting business relationships mentioned in step 3.
Analysis: Telephone calls can be recorded so you can look back at your efforts and analyse what worked well and how to implement this going forward.
Data cleansing: It can be difficult to know exactly who deals with certain aspects of a business. Especially when certain tasks can be dealt with by several individuals and each firm is different. Being able to call the company and ask directly will allow you to gain crucial information that you otherwise wouldn’t have, allowing you to make a call directly to the decision maker the next time.
Meaningful conversations: Your conversations will not just be transactional sales calls, you can share market insights with each other, find out new contacts, and generally grasp a better understanding of a prospects pain points on a telephone call.
Higher conversion rates: When conducted by a solid sales team, telephone calls tend to produce high conversion rates simply because they’re an opportunity to add more value and truly show what you can offer. If you’re tapping into an audience you’ve already engaged via your online activities, then you’ll be guaranteed great results.
We always find that the telephone conversation should always be the last aspect of an outbound campaign and works best once you’ve engaged with the prospect through a combination of outreaches and you’ve seen some engagement from them through previous communication.
If you execute your outbound campaign with the above seven steps prepared and ready to go, then you can be confident you’re doing everything you need to tap into your target market and yield excellent results. Here at Chronicle Law, we understand that not every business is equipped with the resources required to tackle all 7 steps to a successful campaign, that’s why we’re here to help and do the leg work for you.
If you would like to enquire about how we can help design and deliver you a successful outbound campaign, which we call our engagement plans, feel free to reach out to me directly at brett@chroniclelaw.co.uk. Or feel free to contact me if you wish to discuss any of the information within this article.