Reputations and Relationships - how digital builds and maintains conversations with customers

Reputations and Relationships - how digital builds and maintains conversations with customers

Mark Grant – Lewis Silkin

Sam Booth – Reading Room

Digital success in the B2B marketplace is notoriously hard to track

Professional services companies offer an even bigger challenge

Crowded market place

Confusion

Lack of differentiation

Success is hard to quantify…

And even harder to track

Management are focused on core business activity

Often not seeing the value in digital activity

Reading Room and Lewis Silkin set work out what success would like

and have started on a journey to achieve success

• Commercial firm – with real specialisms

• 5 years in the ‘Sunday times Top 100 Companies to Work for’ Listing

• Established in 1952; 60 partners and over 300 staff, with offices at Clifford’s Inn, London, Oxford and Cardiff

• Member of two global Alliances

Who are Lewis Silkin?

• Main specialisms in employment, brand management and real estate and regeneration

• A ‘rather more human law firm’

• Strong brand (pre 2012 – offline stronger than online)

Who are Lewis Silkin?

• Public facing website built on Sharepoint in addition to intranet and extranet.

• Whilst the website held the brand to a certain extent it was flat, cold and not dynamic; difficult to update

• Outside of the website the digital presence was poor

• The competition were gaining ground

• Clients in the sector were asking......

What was the situation?

• Develop a digital strategy that brings on line presence up to speed with off line

• Demonstrate value add

• Do it quickly

The business challenge was clear

• Promoting the brand

• Supporting new business activity

• Growing the profile of teams and individuals

• Servicing / growing existing client accounts

• Recruitment (trainee and ‘laterals’)

• Protecting reputation

What could be achieved?

From a text based website

Transformation not redevelopment

To engaging media, interactivity & engagement

Transformation not redevelopment

From desktop access

Transformation not redevelopment

To multi-device, multi-platform

Transformation not redevelopment

From one-size fits all content

Transformation not redevelopment

To content that adapts

Transformation not redevelopment

From anonymity and equality of service

Transformation not redevelopment

To personalised adaptive messaging

Transformation not redevelopment

From another face in the crowd

Transformation not redevelopment

To being a rather more human law firm

Transformation not redevelopment

From waiting for people to arrive

Transformation not redevelopment

To motivating people and reaching out to people wherever they are

Transformation not redevelopment

We developed a digital transformation strategy with Lewis Silkin

So what did we do?

Legal sector founded on ‘traditional’ service principles • Credibility, expertise and personal connections • These principles are mirrored in the way digital works

Focus on Reputations & Relationships • Pro-active participation and engagement • Multiple co-ordinated channels to maximise impact benefit • Listening and monitoring against success metrics

Digital Strategy:

Essential elements of the digital communications mix:

• Company, people, expertise (Website)

• Approach, thinking, personality (Blog)

• Relationship building, personalised content (Newsletter)

• Communities centred on service areas (Linkedin / Twitter)

• Content repositories, supports SEO (Slideshare / Youtube)

Co-ordinated Communications

• Digital requires a conversational approach

• CRM is not just about technology

• Requires a holistic change in approach

• Social dialogue is key to building relationships

• Offer multiple channels for clients to connect

• Talk to clients in the way that suits them

• Tailor communications to the platform

Building Relationships

• Sitecore allows us to personalise the

content and target different client

sectors.

• Media want a different updates, news

and social content compared to the

social housing clients.

Building Relationships

• We used Sitecore to deliver a corporate site and blog, incorporating

social media content and surfacing the latest personalised content.

• We are now in phase two considering tying in the Sitecore email

marketing capability to utilise that capability and provide further

tailored experiences

What did we do?

Measurement: Objectives / KPIs We needed to agree clear objectives & measurable KPIs

• Support new business

– lead generation (email enquiries, dedicated phone number)

• Grow reputation / influence

– attendance at events, social mentions, search ranking

– email signups, social follows, Linkedin group members

Measurement: Objectives / KPIs We needed to agree clear objectives & measurable KPIs

• Facilitate client relationships

– regularity of interaction (all channels)

– engagement (clicked link in email, posted comment, attended event)

– Source of traffic (email, blog, tweet, linked in group)

Measurement: Monitoring We also need a means of monitoring them

• Web analytics – track interactions as well as page views – report on sources of traffic and segment – user journey monitoring & goal tracking

• Email tracking: opens, clicks, social shares

• Social Tracking: track reach of social activity

• Conversation Monitoring: track social mentions

• CRM: capture individual interactions with clients

We built “the journal”, to encourage the profession to engage, comment, debate and argue… something lawyers are very good at. We ran a social media “road show” explaining the basics of twitter, linked in and blogging and took it around the business

Changing internal behaviour

Governance: Management

• Teams and individual staff need to own their content

– Responsible for accuracy and timeliness

– Proud of it – would happily recommend

– Easy to author and maintain

• Social media champions

– People follow individuals more than organisations / teams

– Need key staff to become social champions, volunteers not forced labour

– Need ground rules / acceptable use policy; a framework for creativity

– Workflow would stifle totally – must be based on trust

Analytics show real improvements.

Engagement is up with bounce rates reducing from over 60% to 25% spending longer on site engaging with more content

How it performed

Mobile usage on the site

has increased massively –

vindicating the mobile first

approach .

People are engaging on

mobile devices not just

bouncing

How it performed

A couple of anecdotal examples of how the strategy has been realised

How it performed

• Much closer than before………

• Other firms adopting Sitecore so need to stay ahead!

• Real engagement from the business

• More to do – marathon not a sprint

Have we succeeded?

@ReadingRoomUK

[email protected]

Thank you