SBI recently spoke with Laura Goldberg, Chief Marketing Officer of LegalZoom. Laura has been with LegalZoom for about 2 years, and faces a common marketing challenge – generating enough leads. To do this, Laura had to create marketing campaign success during her tenure. For this reason, we asked Laura to share how she plans her marketing campaigns with our readers.
Ultimately, there are many reasons your campaign plan may fail. To start with, do you know your audience? Too often marketing leaders have not properly defined their target. This causes them to choose the wrong programs and marketing activities. Laura explained how to avoid this with comprehensive campaign management, from planning to execution.
Determining the Type of Campaigns to Run
Laura began our conversation by explaining that you must determine what types of campaigns to run. “It’s all about defining your goals upfront,” she explained. “What is it that you’re trying to do?” She recommends thinking through your priorities. Are you trying to acquire new customers? Or launch a new product? This understanding of your goals will affect the types of campaigns you will run.
At LegalZoom, Laura and her team start by thinking about their overall marketing objectives. What must their team achieve in order to hit their goals? From there they get more granular, and determine which types of campaigns best suit their needs.
Once you’ve set your objectives, you need to make some critical strategic decisions. For example, what is the budget? What is the medium mix and channels? Laura explained how she makes these decisions at LegalZoom.
“We have a lot of products which complicates things,” said Laura. In order to be effective, Laura groups her products together. And again thinks about what they’re trying to do. Then, she allocates her money against the product groups and determine what the best channels are.
She’s able to do this because she has studied the buying behavior of her prospects. Her team understands how they make decisions. They build campaigns against this, and use the most effective marketing mix.
Campaign Planning
“We have spent a lot of time, energy and money thinking about who our customer is,” explains Laura. They recently completed a segmentation study to determine the characteristics of someone open to new and different ways of purchasing legal solutions. They were able to develop a couple of customer profiles to target.
The next step is creating the content needed to fuel the campaigns. LegalZoom’s marketing team creates a lot of content, and in a different number of ways. For example, because their content is so specialized, they have in-house attorneys that are tasked with writing. Their depth of knowledge makes the content more valuable to their audience.
They are also investing in video content. “We have what we call explainer videos,” said Laura. These videos are able to take complicated subject matter and turn it into something digestible for their audience.
She also ensures that her content and its objectives match the channel. Her team has determined which mediums are good for which things. For example, they use a television advertising campaign to build awareness. Not to elicit a specific response, such as a direct response.
Campaign Metrics
We wrapped up our conversation by discussing key performance indicators at the campaign level. Attribution is one of the biggest challenges of marketing. What drives what? At the end of the day, everything is linked.
Instead, Laura recommends choosing a few key performance indicators. “It’s imperative to at least, at a high level, have two or three goals that are the Holy Grail for your company,” she recommends. For LegalZoom they look at acquisition cost, and lifetime value.
Your marketing budget is always under pressure. You need good results from your marketing campaigns to alleviate this pressure. The first step is campaign planning. And there’s more to it than ever before. Focus on getting your plan right and achieving results.
