No man’s land: Womble Bond Dickinson bridges the gap between digital marketing and business development

30-second summary:

• Focusing on UX and centralizing experiences leads to significant increases in web traffic.
• Stakeholder involvement at all levels, as well as honest conversations, are keys to successful and long-lasting change.
• Improving automation offers valuable insights for business development teams.

Womble Bond Dickinson (WBD), a transatlantic law firm formed in 2017, has an annual revenue of 475 million USD, comprises 27 offices around the world, and employs over 940 attorneys. Within such a complex organization, with so many stakeholders, change in any form is a complex matter. Two years ago, WBD was facing an outdated insights portal on their website and the need for a more intelligent marketing automation platform. 

We sat down with Drew Hawkins, Director of Marketing at WBD, to hear how he went about spearheading and implementing large-scale changes to their marketing systems including what worked and what didn’t, and what lessons he hopes others can learn from his experiences. 

A time for change

Womble Bond Dickinson saw a need for change in two areas of its marketing infrastructure. First, they needed to redo their website and insights portal, with the goal of ultimately bringing all the information under one portal and improving the end-user experience. Hawkins said, “User experience really needed some updating–it hadn’t been updated in a few years.” Not only did they need to see improved functionality but appearance was also a concern. “Our insights pieces honestly looked like something off an original WordPress site, so we needed a much more modern, clean look.” 

Second, WBD planned to shift its marketing automation platform to a Salesforce-based system called Pardot. Hawkins explained that a need for data was behind the drive for this change. WBD wanted a clearer data lens to see what was working and what wasn’t in their email marketing. As Hawkins described, “Instead of just reporting, ‘hey this email had a 30 percent open rate, then a 10 percent click rate’ we’re (now) sending in what the client engagement data, so breaking it out–the target clients that did open this, here’s who’s engaging with it.” Hawkins notes the importance of this insight as a way to open up business development (BD) opportunities through more advanced marketing. He said, “basically we are opening a door between BD and our digital marketing teams.” 

Old insights portal                                                 New insights portal

               

Everything to gain

There were three key things Hawkins and Womble Bond Dickinson hoped to gain from the changes;

• a better UX
• expanded lead generation and data collection
• a more centralized experience

A better UX

When looking at the user experience on the site, Hawkins noted that when people are viewing the site, they are more likely to continue exploring if they find things visually appealing. “People are more likely to go to something that’s a nice reading experience.”

Expanded lead generation and data collection

Beyond the visual appeal, improved lead generation was also paramount. Through the new system, Hawkins describes, “We were able to bake in more natural lead generation opportunities—and we haven’t even used them to their full potential yet.” From a marketing automation perspective, “We had fairly limited data from our old platform–very high level stuff…this many clicks, this many opens, but it was not very user friendly to find.” Hawkins goes on to say,

“We’re taking a very progressive profiling approach to this to do a little bit of lead generation, but not do it in such a way that we’re going to decrease the conversion rate.” 

What WBD wanted was to, “bake in more natural lead generation opportunities.” Hawkins explains that “instead of having a straight landing page saying oh do you want to read this report? Then fill out this form, get a PDF etc…like you normally would, we’re able to bake all that into the insights portal.” 

A more centralized experience

Centralizing the user journey was important to Hawkins. Prior to their changes, “many individual attorneys had blogs and thought leadership living across multiple separate websites/domains that didn’t talk to our main website at all. We had 30+ websites/blogs that were cannibalizing each other for traffic. We decided to bring all of them under one roof in a way that not only attached to the attorney bios but made them searchable on our main website.” Hawkins explains when it came to collecting user data on the site, this disjointed structure made it very difficult. “We’d see this one blog over here is getting this many visits per month, this ones getting this so we’d aggregate that this is the amount of lost traffic we’re getting.” Ultimately, he says, “these are people that could be coming to the Womble Bond Dickinson website and then seeing other related content or clicking on an attorney bio and seeing their services.There was this whole user journey that was getting lost.” 

Stakeholder involvement: the key to change

In order to make these changes possible, Hawkins was keen to illustrate how much stakeholder involvement was needed. “We did a lot of stakeholder interviews with partners. We had to find what people think, so let’s talk to a few dozen partners and just have open ended discussions. I didn’t try to guide it. I just said hey let’s talk about the website. What do you like? What do you hate?” These open-ended conversations made colleagues feel both involved and heard, which helped make for smoother and more positive change. Hawkins makes sure to note that pleasing everyone was impossible.

“I knew I wouldn’t be able to make everybody happy. That’s impossible. So I just had to think, ‘what’s going to have the best effect- what’s going to have the best net positive effect?’”

Beyond speaking with partners, Hawkins and his team had conversations with other stakeholders including the digital marketing teams and the BD strategists. “The firm management committee–a larger committee that makes big budget approvals” were also a source of constant conversation to get items approved from a financial perspective. 

Support from the top was incredibly important and Hawkins notes how happy he was to have it consistently. “We had a lot of support from bosses as well. Our Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Strategy Officer really helped sell it and they’ve been behind it and been very trusting of us from day one.” 

Internal roadblocks

When we asked Hawkins what were some of the biggest challenges he faced, we expected to hear that technological or budgetary issues topped the list. Instead, Hawkins told us, “Technology adoption was not the primary roadblock. We had more of an issue with cultural buy-in. The biggest roadblocks we faced, honestly, were internal.”  

So how did Hawkins and his team change the culture and move forward? Hawkins said that honest conversation and education were key. “If you present a logical reason why you want to go a certain direction, for the most part, attorneys are pretty cool with it.”  Hawkins describes educating the teams about new systems saying,

“We had to not only shift marketing platforms and build new templates and things that go along with that, but also had to change the culture of ‘here’s how we can send emails, here’s how we can do segmentation.There was a cultural bias and we say no, we’re not just going to blindly send stuff, here’s how we’re going to do it. Here’s how we’re going to do segmentation. Here’s how we’re going to build lists.”

The work is not over yet, as Hawkins says, “we’re still continuing to iterate the process.” 

Positive results and encouraging successes

From increasing web traffic to doing more with data, the results from Womble Bond Dickinson’s changes came in a couple of forms. 

As a result of consolidating the information on the site, Hawkins explained that they are now seeing, “a 20-30 percent increase in web traffic just for having everybody come here instead of cannibalizing ourselves online.” As a result of their efforts, WBD is also gaining better metrics from targeted marketing. The marketing teams are, “more intentional in who they’re sending to, what accounts are we engaging, who are we not engaging, and so with that we have better metrics all around.”

In the future, thanks to the improved automation system, Hawkins explains that, “We’ll be able to do more. There will be focused dashboards on ‘account x’ saying ‘here’s our top engaged clients here’s what they’re doing’ so we can see from a channel perspective, here’s where we’re getting the most bang for our buck. We’ll be able to make better budget decisions as a result.” 

Using more integrated tech systems has also allowed for a rather surprising success in the form of better internal collaboration across the company and more effective utilization of certain members of their teams.

“I think the bigger win has been, we’re having to force a more collaborative work style with our BD team. So instead of just being siloed, and being an assembly line, our team has been coming back saying ‘hey we did send this out but also here the accounts engaging with it, please take this back to your practice group team’. We’ve been able to determine people within our team that were probably untapped resources- we had this really great teammate in the team that was being heavily underutilized.”

Overall, we asked Hawkins if he thought the changes he’s implemented thus far have been a success. He said, “I’ve always been funny about identifying that but right now, for the website, I would say that after it was all said and done it was fairly successful, yes.”

Hold change with an open hand

What advice would Hawkins give to others looking to implement large-scale changes across marketing platforms? He urges against quickly dismissing legacy structures and ideas, and encourages early and consistent communication. “Hold change with an open hand and make sure to communicate clearly and in good time.”

There will be ideas and structures internally that have been around for ages, and Hawkins cautioned against being quick to dismiss them. “You have to keep an open mind–dont tear down a wall until you know why it was built there in the first place. Your idea might be the best one, but there might be some legacy things you need to keep in place for a reason.” Ultimately, when implementing changes, he says,  “check your ego at the door.”

 

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