When I was a marketing director in a law firm one of the biggest challenges I had was ensuring brand consistency across different documents – from team sheets and literature to PowerPoint presentations and pitch documents, ensuring a consistent, high-quality output was crucial. But it wasn’t easy.
Legacy systems were (and probably still are) typically Microsoft – Word, PowerPoint, Excel etc. And these did not, and still do not, have the flexibility or sophistication to enable me to produce high quality, visually appealing, brand consistent materials that could be used across all media – internally, external print, adverts etc.
Yes, PowerPoint can be used to produce decent adverts but throw in a specific brand colour and the challenge of ensuring consistent and accurate reproduction became very challenging – I had a particular orange and blue at my two firms – both of which were VERY hard to reproduce!
And I lost count of the number of times I had to 'correct' colours that well-meaning lawyers had added in their attempt to use the nearest possible colour to the firms' brand.
You may recognise some of these challenges in your own firm.
Well in 2022 we have an absolute WEALTH of low cost, easily accessible tools that can help us overcome these challenges. I just wish these had existed 10/15 years ago – my life would have been so much easier AND I would have saved my firm a shed load of money, delivered better stuff quicker and it would have taken less time, meaning more time to do other things.
So here are my ‘top 5’ helpful tools to help your firm with your marketing … I encourage you to check them out.
Canva This tool helps you create high quality, on brand collateral - from adverts, social media collateral, presentations, videos, leaflets, reports and much more. Get the pro/paid for subscription .. from c. £100 pa it's brilliant value.
Evernote I love, love, love this tool. When I come across an interesting article, data, research and other content I want to keep I can 'clip' it to my Evernote account and I can access it anytime, anywhere. It's another great time saving tool that helps me massively and provides me with a lot of content for things like this weekly email, to share with clients e.g. research and trends and much more. There is a free version or you can pay about £45 pa to have extra features. A bargain.
Shield Analytics Want extra analytics and insights into your social media activity ... see trends over past weeks, months and years? Plus see which posts get the best views and engagement ... and much more. This is a tool that will help you/your key people get more from their LinkedIn and wider social media activity. It's about £180 pa ... another great tool.
Zoho One This suite of business software is what I use in my business. For just £360 per user pa I get access to loads of bits of software including survey software, CRM, email, social media management, Apps, webinars/meetings, forms and much much more. You won't want or need to use all the tools as you will have your own in house systems but at this price you only need to use one or two to make a subscription worthwhile e.g. the social media management tool and the survey software (IMO it's equivalent to SurveyMonkey).
Zapier If automation isn't on your agenda - it should be. This tool helps be have slicker processes and automate certain things. For example website form submissions ... data is automatically added to my CRM via a 'zap' using this tool ... as are our webinar registrations etc. Check it out. It's not expensive and it provides a means for you to continue to use legacy software and systems AND benefit from some automation.