Stop sponsoring overly commercialized conferences and find underpriced events

All conferences are not equal. When you’ve sponsored a few different events to try and get your brand in front of a specific audience, you realize that quickly. But ever been to a private event or educational course and seen a brand presented so organically that the audience doesn’t label them a ‘sponsor’? For example: 

• <50 person gatherings hosted by private companies: Because the goal of these events is to promote the host company, and it’s planning is not sophisticated enough to have sought out sponsors, they would often be happy for a non-competing product to sponsor the event just to cover their costs. Trick is, you should reach out them.
• Legal-tech Influencers: You know the influencers on Instagram that get hired by brands to wear their clothing. Well the same exists in the legal profession - people who have a large following of legal professionals online and are not monetizing it well. Reach out and hire them to post about your software product, and pay them per post or per click (if they include you in their newsletter). It's much like paying for an advertisement in the law society's magazine. Reply to this email for some e-intros to legal-tech influencers, we've had conversations with several in the US and Canada who would welcome more companies to represent.

Get into the classroom - speak in Law Schools and Paralegal Colleges 

As soon as your content is offered by an educational institution, it changes from ‘marketing’ to ‘education’, 5x’ing your credibility. Welcome to the danger and beauty of post-secondary. 

• Lumose Marketplace is partnering with the Toronto School of Management to provide a legal tech course for paralegals. The course will be a mélange of several different legal-tech companies, one from each category of legal-tech to show paralegals what legal-tech is all about! 🤓
• Each lecture will focus on a different legal practice area and will include an in-depth feature of a legal tech vendor relevant to that practice area or paralegal task. Let us know which category of legal-tech your company could be a guest speaker for. Really, email us here: shaynah@lumosemarketplace.com.

Other Tips to Maximize Your Marketing Budget

Don’t choose the speaking spot during lunch - people often talk amongst themselves and  often won’t be present for your talk.

Get outside the business world for sponsorships: if your target market isn’t incredibly niche, consider small music festivals and sporting events like highschool football games, equestrian events, golf clubs, and bingos.

Target industries opposite to who you normally sell to. Why? Because there won’t be other legal-tech vendors - or even lawyers - talking to them. Examples:

• Mining: Canada’s critical minerals strategy means the attention on the mining industry is going to continue to grow. Mines have financing needs just as much as private equity, but don’t get marketed to by many legal software companies.
• Indigenous Relations: Indigenous communities have to review countless contracts when being consulted by companies to build something through or on their land; capacity funding agreements, project summaries, employment arrangements for their communities. We already have a shortage of indigenous rights lawyers - can contract review software help reduce their legal team's workload?

Be seen beside brands that are nothing like you - that makes people ask ‘what do you do’? Go where people are different from you, and you will be easily noticed.

Platforms where no one else is marketing

Which influences society more, Instagram or Netflix? I might be close but way more people are marketing on Instagram than Netflix that’s for sure! Most of us have probably read Noah Waisberg’s book on AI for lawyers, but who’s made a documentary about legal-tech? 🎥

The timing for AI and legal ain’t bad right now :)

Using Government Grants to plan your marketing budget

But before we get hopped up on government funds and forget any need to provide real, self-sustaining products to people, here’s an overview of how to apply knowledge about grants to your business:

• Sell into industries that are receiving grants: Look at which industries money is pouring into that you have overlooked. For example mining, automotive manufacturing, immigration, training providers for skilled trades. 
• Your clients can apply for grants to adopt your software: Right now there are lots of grants to help industrial companies digitize and adopt software. Even if you don’t directly receive the grant, your client can receive a grant to fund the ‘digitization’ of their business, including the procurement and implemention software products. 
• Must be spending money: The majority of grants cover a portion of your expenses (whether hiring expenses or marketing expenses), meaning you need to be spending money to receive some. Funds go towards whatever the ‘powers that be’ have decided is good for the economy; educating the public on EV charging, exporting more products, encouraging investment in industries they want to grow quickly (mining, automotive manufacturing, immigration), training workers for professions with a labour shortage, providing rural communities with essentials like water or gas, or subsidising the salary of certain demographics that aren’t hired as often. Point being, if it’s something that’s already super popular, it’s not going to be subsidised.

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