How AI and Machine Learning Will Transform the Legal Industry
Jul 09, 2020 • 4 Minute Read • Brad Johnson, Group Account Director
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How the Legal Industry Can Attract Millennial Clients
Feb 20, 2020 • 3 Minute Read • Brad Johnson, Group Account Director
Millennials are the largest living generation, accounting for about 25% of the United States population. And in 2020, we’ll start to see the full impact of their purchasing power as they reach $1.4 trillion in annual spending.
The Millennial generation is especially valuable to the legal industry. With 36% of Millennials having experienced a legal issue compared to 15% of older U.S. adults, there’s plenty of market opportunity for you to capture.
And luckily, the rising generation of Millennial consumers view lawyers more favorably than older clients. One study found that 46% of Millennials who have dealt with a legal issue think very positively about attorneys overall, compared to just 31% of older consumers.
However, Millennials won’t be swayed by outdated marketing messages. If you want to attract more Millennial clients, you’ll need to update your marketing strategies.
Why Legal Marketing Falls Short for Millennials
Many marketers (regardless of industry) make a critical mistake when targeting Millennials—they focus on adjusting their offers rather than their strategies. In the legal industry, it’s not enough to understand the pain points of Millennials and offer services that uniquely address those needs. Rather, you should be focusing more on engaging Millennials in the ways they expect.
According to one consumer survey, traditional marketing tactics simply don’t engage Millennials the way you hope they will. The study found that just 1% of millennials feel a traditional advertisement would make them trust a brand more.
Before trying to create marketing messages about your specific services, consider the larger trends around millennial consumer behavior. This segment of potential clients:
- Always Starts with Research: Self-service is an essential part of the Millennial buying process. Before making a decision, they’ll Google their issues and search for the best possible path forward. More than half of Millennials say they research their legal issues online and 63% of Millennials use the internet to find an attorney compared to 33% of all other consumers. Shifting your focus on digital marketing as opposed to traditional tactics is critical to winning Millennial business.
- Doesn’t Want to be Sold to: Millennials are generally skeptical of salespeople. Because they value self-service, they can be easily turned off by hard selling. Trying to skip over awareness and consideration stages of the purchase process to immediately convert Millennials with marketing messages won’t work. You need to build a connection before these prospects come to trust you.
- Expects On-Demand Experiences: Traditional channels don’t appeal to Millennials. They don’t want offers in the mail, they don’t want to make phone calls to talk to customer service reps, and they don’t want to meet with agents in person. Millennials don’t just want on-demand digital experiences—they expect them. Being able to tailor marketing strategies to modern channels is a necessity rather than a luxury.
Fixing your legal marketing strategy to attract Millennial clients isn’t just about running ads on digital platforms. To truly engage these prospects, you need to revamp your overarching approach to marketing. More and more, that means shifting to a conversational strategy.
Conversational Legal Marketing to Millennials
There’s no single, universal tactic that will ensure legal marketing success when targeting Millennials. However, putting customers at the center of your marketing strategy and focusing on the unique expectations of Millennial prospects will help you attract more clients.
This starts with making your marketing strategy more conversational. Because ads and traditional channels don’t engage Millennials, you need a way to gain their trust without making the hard sell. Conversational marketing helps you do just that. By taking a conversational approach to legal marketing, you commit to:
- Engaging on the Client’s Time: Conversational marketing focuses on creating asynchronous relationships with your prospects/clients. That means letting the prospect control communications and empowering them to engage whenever works best. Real-time conversations are important to offer. But it’s just as valuable to enable asynchronous communications with your marketing experiences.
- Scaling Seamless Experiences: Millennials don’t want to feel like they’re on the receiving end of mass marketing messages. But scaling conversational marketing can be easier said than done. Taking advantage of the right combination of chatbots and human agents can help you scale seamless digital marketing experiences.
- Delivering Contextual Messages: Traditional marketing strategies revolve around one-off engagements. Most traditional marketing interactions didn’t include any contextual insight into customer relationships. But Millennials expect this level of personalization. When they move between channels, they expect your marketing to reflect where they are in their research/decision-making process. Being able to deliver contextual marketing messages (whether through automated channels or human interaction) can help make Millennial prospects trust your services.
It may seem difficult to make the large shift from traditional marketing to this kind of conversational strategy. However, there are plenty of companies you can partner with to implement the technology necessary to deliver these conversational experiences. Our own technology partner Cognigy, is a leader in conversational automation, helping clients achieve 30% increases in sales, 80% reductions in fulfilment times, and 30% cost savings.
With technology like Cognigy and a marketing strategy that revolves around conversational relationships, you can attract more Millennial clients by delivering personalized, on-demand experiences at scale.
If you want to learn more about what it takes to engage Millennial prospects with modern customer experiences, contact us today and take advantage of our proven methodology for reaching this market segment.