Background
The Law Society is the independent professional body for solicitors in England and Wales and is run by and for its members. The Society’s role is to be the voice of solicitors, to drive excellence in the profession and to safeguard the rule of law and increase market share. On behalf of the profession, the Society influences the legislative and regulatory environment in the public interest. At home, it promotes the profession and the vital role legal services play in our economy. Around the word it promotes England and Wales as a global legal centre, opens new markets and defends human rights.
Digital Willow was selected following a competitive pitch to lead the Law Society’s digital marketing initiatives. As part of the engagement, we delivered a tailored mix of services, including strategy, media planning and buying, content marketing, and marketing automation. One of our first key projects has been to help increase the market share of The Law Society’s Law Gazette Jobs board—an important priority as competition in the legal recruitment sector continues to accelerate.
DW Approach
To achieve this goal, Digital Willow began with in-depth market research, benchmarking Gazette Jobs against a wide range of competing platforms. We evaluated multiple criteria, including job inventory, website traffic, volume of legal job listings, data capture capabilities, and user experience.
With this foundation, we shifted focus to Gazette Jobs’ core revenue stream—recruiters. Through interviews and behavioural analysis, we uncovered key drivers behind their choice to advertise (or not) with the platform. This gave us valuable insight into both strengths to build on and barriers to overcome.
Armed with this intelligence, we developed a strategic framework aimed at increasing candidate traffic and enhancing the platform’s appeal to legal recruiters. A critical outcome of this phase was securing stakeholder alignment on clearly defined KPIs. These KPIs became the guiding benchmarks for performance, allowing us to prioritise activity and build a focused, data-driven marketing plan to maximise impact.
Results
Within the first month of activity, we managed to get a job view ratio of 5.1; this means that for every £1 spent on advertising the Law Gazette received just over 5 job views.
A supporting KPI was measuring the click-through rate (CTR) of the advertising. Here, again the results are excellent, with management of Google Search and Bing outperforming the industry averages; Digital Willow achieved CTR of 3.82% for Google and 4.02% for Bing, whereas the industry average is 2% and 2.83%, respectively. These figures indicate that the strategy is indeed reaching the right audience and working marketing spend to its highest efficiency.
Retargeting also played a big part in the few weeks this campaign has been running – over 36.5% of impressions of all channels have come through retargeting. Despite boasting the most job views, the retargeting channel also has the lowest cost per job view of only £0.15.