Event marketing is a critical part of every law firm's relationship strategy. Getting the right people to attend events, collaborate with partners, and deepen relationships is a key aspect of client relationship management and growth. However, driving a high-quality event marketing program is challenging—from analyzing locations and identifying the most appropriate places to host events, to collaborating with attorneys and building attendee lists, to actually encouraging attendance at the event.
The Challenges of Event Marketing
Event marketing presents several significant challenges for law firms:
Uncertainty and Planning Difficulties You often don't know how many people will attend, whether you have enough contacts in a particular region, or if potential attendees will be interested in the content. Picking the right location, venue, and setting adds another layer of complexity to the planning process.
List Building Challenges Once you decide to host an event, identifying the right contacts to invite becomes incredibly difficult. Questions arise: Who do you have strong relationships with? Who should and shouldn't be invited? Who will be interested in the content? Do you have enough contacts in the region or city to make the event successful?
Attorney Engagement Getting attorneys to buy into the event and actively encourage their key relationships to attend can be challenging. Without their engagement, even the best-planned events can fall short of attendance goals.
Data and Collaboration Issues Many firms lack a clean, searchable database of contacts. Knowing who you know, having accurate data to work with, and being able to collaborate effectively with attorneys on identifying top relationships all present significant obstacles. Even after creating a list, ensuring attorneys actually encourage their clients to attend remains a persistent challenge.
How ERM Helps
Automated Data Collection
ERM systems provide an incredibly important foundation by automatically collecting relationship data with no data entry required from attorneys. Data is enriched and cleansed, giving you a rich dataset on your relationships that can be easily searched, sorted, and filtered. This allows you to see and analyze firm relationships in real time, providing an accurate, up-to-date foundation to work from.
Targeting Event Locations
Understanding Your Relationship Geography Targeting a specific location for an event can be difficult when you're not sure exactly how many relationships you have in a particular region. As you plan your event schedule, having an ERM that can tell you how many people you know in each city, their seniority levels, industries, company sizes, and relationship strengths becomes incredibly valuable for your event strategy.
Identifying High-Density Regions If you can identify high clusters of relationships in particular regions or cities, you can better plan and identify locations with the best opportunity for success. Using an ERM to quickly search by city, title, location, company size, industry, and relationship strength allows you to target regions with high relationship density, giving you a better chance of hosting high-quality events because you have sufficient relationships in the area.
Building Better Lists
ERM systems excel at helping you build targeted attendee lists. You can easily segment contacts by numerous attributes including:
- Company and Industry: Target specific sectors relevant to your event topic
- Title and Level: Filter by C-level executives, directors, managers, or contributors
- Location: Specify city or region for geographic targeting
- Company Size: Focus on organizations that match your criteria
- Relationship Strength: Prioritize contacts with stronger firm relationships
- Latest Interaction Date: Identify actively engaged contacts
Collaborative Approach Instead of asking attorneys to build lists from scratch, the BD and marketing team can proactively suggest relationships to attorneys, allowing them to review and approve the presented list. This approach means attorneys don't have to identify every relationship themselves—marketing does the heavy lifting.
This collaborative process allows the marketing team to add significant value by quickly generating thoughtful lists that attorneys can review. Attorneys can then add people marketing may have missed or remove suggested contacts, and the BD and marketing team quickly has an accurate list by attorney of who should be invited to the event.
Encouraging Attendance
Once invitations are ready to send, ERMs make it easy to identify which attorneys have the strongest relationships with each client. This information is valuable whether invitations go out directly from attorneys or through an email marketing platform.
Personalized Follow-Up You can identify who has the strongest relationship with each contact and should follow up personally to encourage attendance. This personal touch from the right attorney can significantly impact event attendance.
With an ERM, it's simple to see which attorney has the strongest relationship with each client and should be the one driving event attendance and reaching out to encourage participation.
Summary
Driving high-quality events becomes a nearly impossible task when you have to approach attorneys and ask them to build lists from scratch. Without proper data and visibility into firm relationships, you're at a significant disadvantage.
Using an ERM allows you to avoid manual data entry while gaining clear visibility into firm relationships that are kept up-to-date in real time. This enables firms to:
- Better target cities where events are most likely to succeed
- Collaborate effectively with attorneys on the appropriate people to invite
- Drive better attendance by leveraging the attorney with the strongest relationship
With an ERM foundation, event marketing transforms from a difficult, manual process into a strategic, data-driven program that delivers measurable results and stronger client relationships.