With many companies still working remotely and live events slowly ramping up later in the year, most companies are increasing digital marketing budgets in 2021 to help drive sales.
As almost 70 percent of the buyer’s journey happens digitally, marketing has an even more critical sales support role than ever. So it’s no surprise that market research company Outsell reports 60 percent of marketers recently surveyed are increasing their marketing budgets this year and only 22 percent decreasing.
And the biggest increases in spending are for digital ads, webcasts, brand marketing and content marketing, with more than 50 percent of respondents saying they are increasing these strategies this year.
Source: Outsell
But this year’s marketing spending is unlike pre-COVID spending. First, Outsell found that 54 percent of marketers are predicting that it won’t be until 2022 or 2023 when their marketing budgets get back to pre-COVID levels. And even when they do, there is a much higher focus on measuring ROI and justifying spend on a regular basis.
One way Law.com can help: We just rolled out three new high-impact ad units to amp up your messages’ engagement with our audience. Our data shows these units get 3-to-6 times higher CTR than standard ROS ad banners.
And we have other suggestions for improving the ROI you are getting with webcasts, brand marketing and content marketing. Please email me at
[email protected].
Trends Legal Industry Marketers Need to Know
- Corporate legal department interest in legal tech will only continue to grow. No matter the type of technology — from e-discovery to legal research to information governance and more — corporate legal are increasingly legal tech drivers. This means that for any legal tech company, the corporate market must be a client that should be considered.
- There weren’t any huge M&A deals during February, but there were plenty of moderately-sized M&A deals in a variety of types of technology: LawPay/ClientPay, Veristar/Planet Data, Opus 2/Bar Squared. There is likely a COVID element in place: Some of these deals might have taken place in 2020, but proceedings were paused until the world became a bit more stable. However, this rush of deals may be more than that. Legal tech is seen as a worthwhile outside investment, and there are enough good ideas out there that others want to integrate. M&A is likely only going to continue to forge ahead throughout 2021.
- There’s been a lot of conversation and reader interest about defensible data deletion and ephemeral messaging how-tos, with our audience wondering what data is necessary to keep and what can be let go. With privacy regulations coming to more states, this conversation is expected to pick up in earnest quickly.
- For the second month in a row, data privacy / cybersecurity has shown renewed interest brought on by COVID and publicized cyber threats. We had a contributed piece talking about how this year will see a continued focus on the importance of data use and data sharing to business operations, new and changing privacy laws and enforcement, and the proliferation and devastation of cyberattacks on already vulnerable workforces. Another driver of registrations was on the prospect of a New York privacy law on the horizon and variations in how different states approach issues like a private right of action or employee data protections could make privacy compliance increasingly difficult. Data breaches, while frequent in number and severity, remain big news events today.
- With the Biden administration’s emphasis on human rights and the upcoming 10th anniversary of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, corporate social responsibility is an issue of increasing focus and prominence. We featured a contributed piece on six best practices in corporate human rights and social responsibility. Also, we covered a report that said that ESG efforts, as well as getting employees back into the office safely, are among the topics that boards of directors and their general counsel should be concerned about in 2021.
