In the latest installment of Brand Building in 15 Minutes, Builden Founder Jocelyn Brumbaugh and Business Development & Strategic Growth Manager Devon Pine outlined how fractional and interim marketing support services work and how they cut overhead costs, minimize risk and maximize productivity. 

Jocelyn explained the necessity of fractional marketing services as a resource for in-house marketers who may feel overwhelmed by marketing plans or major employee turnover. Devon shared tips to integrate fractional marketing services for projects including:

• Website redesign management
• Attorney biography and practice description refreshes
• Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives
• Business development coaching

Watch the full webinar:

 

The Brand Building in 15 Minutes webinar series gives attorneys, marketers and legal administrators practical tips for efficiently executing marketing efforts in a bite-sized timeframe. The program topics focus on process-driven best practices that help raise law firm profiles.

Builden is changing the way law firms think about marketing by turning random acts of marketing into strategies that drive business development. Our seasoned team of legal marketers helps firms of all sizes better engage with clients, prospects and talent.

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Video Transcription

Jocelyn Brumbaugh:
All right, and we’re ready to go welcome everyone to Brand Building in 15 minutes. We are here today to talk about navigating marketing gaps, and there are a lot of them. I’m Jocelyn Brumbaugh. I am the founder of Builden Partners and this is my colleague, Devin Pine. She is joining me today to talk about all the things you need to know about how to get through this very challenging hiring market.

But first, you know, us, we are Builden Partners. We do marketing strategy for law firms exclusively, and our business falls into two streams. We serve as an outsourced marketing department for firms with 15 to 150 attorneys, and we also do a lot of project work for AmLaw 100 and 200 firms. And here’s why we can do that – because we have an amazing senior team. They come from all of the biggest law firms globally, regionally, nationally, and we have a very strong junior team all backing them up. But Devin, what are we here to talk about today? How to solve this hiring problem?

Devin Pine:
Yes. And let’s start by talking about that problem itself, that the Great Resignation really hit law firm marketing departments hard. And you all work in law firms so you know this, especially if you’re in the marketing or business development department, and those of you who also are in the HR department, know that it is brutal out there right now because just as attorneys were reinvigorated about their business development plans with COVID lockdowns in the rearview mirror, their Great Resignation. Again, it really hit these departments hard. But fractional marketing or interim marketing can really help ease some of the burden.

But let’s talk about just how hard the Great Resignation hit these departments. Nationwide resignations have remained abnormally high since peaking in April of 2021, and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 4.4 million Americans quit their job in February of 2022. And this trend doesn’t show any signs of slowing down, with almost 11.3 million job openings at the end of February.

Now, these national trends are hitting close to home in the professional services industry. Law firm marketing departments, who are perpetually asked to do more with less, now have numerous open positions, fewer prospective candidates and less bandwidth to support the initiatives that really can move the needle. Now, we know that a lot of law firms have lifted their hiring freezes and now face this really daunting combination of active open roles, but a disinterested candidate pool. And we took a look at the Legal Marketing Association’s Career Center, there’s about 150 open marketing positions posted right now. So, we know that law firm marketing departments are really feeling that pressure of attorneys who want help with marketing, but they only have a skeleton staff to support them. So, Jocelyn, now that we know how bad it is, can you tell us a little bit about fractional marketing?

Jocelyn Brumbaugh:
Yeah. So fractional marketing, it’s really a catch all name for all of the things that you need. It means contract help. It means interim help. It means family leave cover or maternity leave cover. Basically, somebody who can get the job done when you don’t have the time or the staff to do it. Because it’s hard.

You care about your firm and your attorneys. I remember how hard it was to find cover for my maternity leaves when I was at Baker McKenzie and Foley & Lardner. I wanted to leave my attorneys in good hands, but good hands can be really hard to find. And I found that freelancers were of no help if they didn’t understand the partnership model and how to navigate it. There are just too many nuances, there’s too many rounds of approval, there’s too much caring about the order in which you list people in the CC line.

You really need somebody with the gravitas gained through years in big law or it just isn’t going to work. And fractional support can fill the gaps that members of the marketing and BD teams just don’t have the bandwidth to cover. So, this allows in-house teams to focus on strategic projects or, just as importantly, avoids burnout in your team. And that’s because burnout is when you get when people are wearing too many hats, which is what everybody in-house is doing right now.

So, when you get a resource that understands law firm marketing, this can be a great temporary or long long-term fix. There’s plenty of projects that can be knocked out in a month and that’s great. But there’s other firms that use it for the long haul. If it makes you and your department look good, you’ve got to use it.

So, Devin, tell us what kind of projects work really well for outsourcing.

Devin Pine:
Yes, thank you. So now that we know what this is, yes, let’s talk about these types of projects. And you know, before we dive into this list, I just want to say we have some clients who have Builden on a retainer, and we really just step in as needed. But that’s not necessarily right for every single firm, For fractional marketing coverage, we especially recommend a project-based approach. So, let’s look at some what some of these projects could look like. All of these items: RFP coverage, attorney, biography, and practice description refreshes, conference and sponsorship coordination’s, website redesign management, that’s a big one, as we all know, business development coaching, diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, these all really fit the bill.

But if you’re stuck, you have no idea where to start, think about those projects and longer-term initiatives that are haunting your to-do list. We all have some of those, right?

Especially that content refresh and I’m looking at you bios, you know, that is the number one thing that we see legal marketers saying this has been on my to-do list for months, but I just have not gotten around to it. These projects that have been keeping you up at night, turn them over to a fractional marketing team. And that’s when you’re going to really see the needle move.

So, there are obviously a lot of pros here. We know what kind of projects work with well with this. But let’s look at the pros and cons that fractional marketing can offer.

So fractional marketing is not a temp agency. And while I was in house, I’m thinking of two temp experiences in particular that frankly ended kind of badly, and shorter than the temp was hired on for. And that was really because they didn’t know and understand the legal industry, and they hadn’t worked with attorneys before, which we’ll get more into that later.

You know, and I will say law firms are not the only ones who are affected by the Great Resignation. But if that turnover impacts your fractional marketing agency, that is not your problem.

There’s a level of stickiness that you can leverage here because a fractional marketing team will often bring just that, a team, so that you don’t have to worry about that turnover, moving things off the back burner. You know, we just talked about those things haunting your to-do list. The huge pro here is to really move the needle on those projects.

And then finally, the biggest pro of fractional marketing in my opinion, is that it can become your secret weapon as an in-house legal marketer. We are here to make you, that legal marketing team, look good.

And while there are some clients that have us work with attorneys directly, we often recommend keeping the fractional marketing team behind the curtain at first. This is going to allow you to present deliverables and ideas directly to your attorneys and really come off as the superhero.

Now, of course, we all know that there’s cons to everything, right?

If your fractional marketing team does not know the legal industry, and especially if they have not worked with attorneys before that experience is going to make your entire department lose credibility. And again, Jocelyn’s going to dive into this importance more in a second, but we all know working with attorneys can be a special kind of challenge. So, it’s so important to have a team come in and have that experience under their belt. And then finally another con is that remote factor, as a lot of law firms return to the office, oftentimes a fractional marketing team will stay remote and they don’t get that face to face time that the team in the office does. But we all know, you know, we’re all over two years into this pandemic. We’ve all gotten really good at Zoom, so that’s still an option, but that face-to-face time can be on that con list.

But we saw that the pros outweigh the cons. So now that we know that how do we identify what the right support is for you?

One of the takeaways of the Great Resignation is that law firms need to be willing to adapt. The marketing and business development departments that succeed in this post COVID job market are going to be the ones who find creative solutions to filling the gaps in service. So, you’ve really got to think creatively here. And start by thinking through your goals and projects. What do you want to achieve with a fractional marketer? This answer is going to tell you which solution is best for you.

Fractional contract marketing support is going to come in a lot of different forms, right? So, this includes temporary replacements for open marketing positions. Think about high-level strategy development, stop-gap solutions for firms struggling to fill full-time director, manager, and specialist roles, project management, especially that website redesign, right? Contract cover for leaves of absence including parental leaves or FMLA coverage. Or maybe you need that hands-on tactical person to do data entry CRM cleanup, or again, we’re tracking those bios for that bio refresh.

And I do want to just look over here in this tip in the blue bubble, using practice specific assistance for launches and signature events can be so key. A practice specific fractional marketing person is going to allow that team to really get to know the attorneys, their goals, and most importantly their clients’ businesses. And that’s going to come across really successfully and make you as the in-house legal marketer look good.

So, Jocelyn, we know what kind of support we need, how do we start leveraging that?

Jocelyn Brumbaugh:
Right. So, you know, Devin talked about how this support can really serve you up multiple solutions, right? It could be the strategic or the day-to-day services that are going to keep the trains running on time or that big idea that your overworked marketers wish they had time to create, you know, either of those are great options and here are the upsides: one of the most obvious upsides of fractional marketing is the significant cost reduction compared to sourcing it in-house. There’s no overhead, there’s no paying benefits, there’s no lengthy process to get your FTE approved. It also gives the firm the benefits of an experienced team who can hit the ground running without having to train them. You get these veteran marketing leaders without having to hire them full time. And a key component to hiring the right people for this is to look for a senior team with experience in law firm marketing departments because really, only people who understand how to show hard charging practice group leaders quick progress on firm initiatives, that’s how you’re gonna be able to deliver results. And really Builden, Builden is a great solution if this is the situation that you find yourself in. We help bridge those gaps when you’re having trouble filling those critical roles and when your partners are getting frustrated with progress, we can be your superpower because we know legal, we only work with law firms, because we all came from law firms. And just like you, we love that challenge of winning over partners and showing them what a well thought out marketing plan can do for their practice.

We always bring multiple team members to the party, unlike your full-time team members who sometimes go on vacation and can’t handle 27 urgent projects all at once. We staff projects with multiple people to smooth out all of those rough spots, and no matter what smart Builden person is staffing your project, we give you access to all of our subject matter experts. So maybe it’s a BD expert like Devin, maybe you need a website redesign pro, maybe you need a content guru, we’ve got you covered.

And so that’s it. Brand Building in 15 minutes is taking the summer off. I know you’re sad, but we will be back in the fall with lots of actionable law firm marketing insights. And if you just can’t wait, be sure to sign up for our newsletter at Hello@Buildenpartners.com and that will tie you over until the fall. Thanks everyone. We’ll see you then.