In an effort to tap into unrealized opportunities in a notoriously tough-to-reach market, a legal marketing firm reaches out to Olive & Company to help them leave a lasting impression.
What began with two attorneys in Northern California in 1995 has grown to become FindLaw, a leading legal resource with more than 1000 employees and $100 million in annual revenue. Acquired by Thomson Reuters in 2001, the company is a pioneer in the legal market, serving lawyers, businesses, and individuals. In addition to professional and consumer online resources, FindLaw offers award-winning legal marketing solutions, delivering qualified prospects to some of the nation’s largest firms.
Challenge: Untapped Potential
Even after nearly two decades perfecting an unparalleled service offering, FindLaw knew there were still markets left untapped. Markets that represented valuable prospects. After analyzing the data they had available, they decided to focus on New York City firms located in high-rent area codes. The team at FindLaw compiled a targeted list of well-known personal injury, criminal defense, and family law firms that made marketing a high priority as evidenced by their existing promotional efforts.
The end result made exactly the impression FindLaw had hoped for. It was one of the most successful direct mail pieces they had seen.
However, despite FindLaw’s excellent reputation and established history in the industry, they knew it would be challenging to get marketing materials past discerning executive gatekeepers. They would need to develop truly compelling and unique pieces to get their message into the hands of decision makers.
In the past, FindLaw had successfully used integrated marketing campaigns to reach out to strong prospects. A field force, unmatched by their competition and spread strategically throughout the country, would connect with prospective accounts within a sales campaign every 90 days.
This local, engaged contact would be even more systematic with this new high-potential list. Each territory within New York City was made up of 10-20 accounts. The sales consultants would contact these accounts through email, direct mail, and phone calls every 60-90 days, regardless of whether they were connected with a sales campaign or not. These consultants were in it for the long haul, running a marketing marathon. All they needed were the tools to get them to the finish line.
Solution: Overcoming Communication Block
FindLaw turned to Olive & Company to help them develop these tools in the form of a direct mail campaign. In early conversations with the agency, the concept of the marathon nature of their business resonated with the FindLaw team. And, with their target city hosting a historical marathon each year, the theme quickly became the driving force behind their materials.
Olive created race packets to serve as the vehicle for FindLaw’s messaging. They created marathon course maps, event ID tags, and images of business professionals running to integrate the theme throughout the materials.
While the marathon theme established compelling imagery and tied the campaign together, the most impressive touch was the level of customization incorporated into each individual race packet. Because FindLaw maintains an immense amount of data on the firms in the target zip codes, Olive was able to leverage variable data to personalize nearly every element of the packets.
Where simply updating data fields was not enough to tailor the information, a cohesive set of modular print components came into play. These self-contained pieces allowed FindLaw to tailor each packet with the exact information their target decision makers needed.
Results: Reaching The Decision Maker
The end result made exactly the impression FindLaw had hoped for. It was one of the most successful direct mail pieces they had seen. Recipients recalled the packets in future conversations with their FindLaw consultant, a fact that energized the sales force. After the pieces were delivered, they hit the phones, using the race packets and the marketing marathon messaging to drive conversations and the sales process.
“This was one of the best examples of a mailer that was recalled clearly by gatekeeper and recipient. This stimulated our phone channel to follow up quickly after packages were delivered, and mention the piece as a leading part of their script. The tie-in to our message ‘online marketing is a marathon, not a sprint’ was very creative.”
– Edwin Van Riessen, former director of integrated marketing/channel marketing, FindLaw
