How Oktopost Has Empowered Lewis Silkin to Improve Engagement Rate by 140%

Lewis Silkin is a law firm that works with leading businesses helping them to protect and enhance their most important assets - their people, their ideas, and their future. The firm offers highly ranked, market-leading practice areas and deep cross-firm market expertise in the chosen sectors. With offices across the UK, Ireland, and Hong Kong, and with strategic alliances across the globe, Lewis Silkin is recognized by clients and industry alike as being distinct for its unique culture and for providing solutions to complex, multi-jurisdictional business challenges with a pragmatic and human touch.

Building the Art of the Possible with an All-Encompassing Social Media Solution

Up until last year, Lewis Silkin didn't have an in-house social media team and was leaning on agency support to maintain its social media presence: from creating and scheduling posts to reporting and analyzing performance to optimize the strategy.

This changed when the firm realized that social media is an avenue it relies on heavily for getting its content out to prospective clients and building brand awareness. To give social the focus that it deserves, Lewis Silkin decided to move it in-house and start educating internal stakeholders around the potential of that channel. The firm recruited a new headcount into the team and started looking for a social engagement platform that would meet their needs and priorities.

"It's all about building that art of the possible. We come up with lots of good ideas and we've got strong people who write really good content - there's a huge potential to do something exciting for our brand on social. But we needed a platform that would facilitate all of our owned, earned, and paid efforts rather than having a few disparate systems to manage different aspects of our strategy separately," Philip Tyler, Digital Lead - Marketing Communications at Lewis Silkin.

Powerful Data Analytics Capabilities to Showcase and Dissect Success

That is when Oktopost came onto the firm's radar as the only solution on the market that could enable them to do what they wanted to achieve across those three pillars of social: owned, earned, and paid.

With the focus on professional networks, specifically LinkedIn, Oktopost provides unmatched analytics, which was a huge draw to the platform for Lewis Silkin and landed perfectly into where the firm was planning to take the social strategy.

Social BI

One of the key reasons Lewis Silkin chose Oktopost over other vendors is advanced reporting capabilities - the power to showcase and dissect success.

"We had a sweep of the market, took stock of what was available, spoke to colleagues and friends from other places to see what systems they used. But ultimately it boiled down to how can we make sure we extrapolate the value out of the system and how can we be held accountable for the success of our social marketing activity. And you can't do that unless you have a robust reporting system in place like Oktopost's Social BI," Philip Tyler, Digital Lead - Marketing Communications at Lewis Silkin.

Because of the nature of their business, the team is spending a lot of time looking into LinkedIn performance and trying to get a sense of any patterns. Social BI is helping them hone their social content strategy by identifying high-performing formats, topics, attachment types, the best time to post, and more.

Being able to drill down to everything that's happening on social and quickly share it with anyone at the firm has another important advantage. Today, Lewis Silkin is on a journey to build its marketing technology stack. More tools mean more data, and more data equals more power but only if you know how to use it.

Before implementing multiple other platforms, the team wanted to answer a fundamental marketing question: How do we share that data internally in a way that makes sense, resonates with stakeholders, and creates clear value for the business?

It's all about how you package and present data to stakeholders so that they can understand it and learn from it rather than scaring them off with a load of abstract, out-of-context numbers. Once people recognize the value of that data, they start building an appetite for more and want existing information to be coupled with other datasets to paint a bigger picture.

As a gateway into the world of marketing technology, Oktopost is helping Lewis Silkin make sure the wider team is hungry for more client data and that implementing other tech won't be a waste of resources.

The People Database

When marketers share social media data internally in a wider business context, one specific point comes up a lot: "So we have a great engagement rate on that post and an X number of clicks. But who is engaging with it?"

Lewis Silkin's marketers have been asked the same question by their BD and legal teams.

Any other social media platform on the market is not able to answer this question in a consistent way but Oktopost can. The People Database is a one-of-a-kind tool that enables Lewis Silkin to see who their followers are and to make connections between social audiences and known customers or prospects.

"It's always good to see a high engagement rate but we're actually more interested to know who is engaging with us. Is it people we should care about in terms of business and how do we judge that? The People Database has surfaced an additional layer of our social data that we didn't know was available. Now we can separate the content our employees and other legal professionals engage with from posts that are actually generating interest among our target audience," Philip Tyler, Digital Lead - Marketing Communications at Lewis Silkin.

Social Media Governance

In addition to Social BI and the People Database that are helping to push the firm's big rocks, Lewis Silkin's team also appreciates Oktopost's productivity features that make life easier by removing tediousness and human error from social media management.

Customizable, multi-level Approval Workflows allow the team to quickly review, approve, and collaborate on social posts before they go live, enabling high levels of team efficiency without sacrificing the requisite quality.

Another helpful feature is Banned Keywords. In addition to restricting explicit language, the firm is using it to ensure the right messaging on social media:

"There is a certain language that only Legal Services professionals are going to understand. Occasionally those jargon words creep into our external comms. With the Banned Keywords feature, we've been able to nip that in the bud and keep tight control over our marketing messaging on social," Philip Tyler, Digital Lead - Marketing Communications at Lewis Silkin.

Reaching the Target Audience with the Right Content

Lewis Silkin has seen the social media engagement rates increase by 140% compared to when the firm started using Oktopost. More importantly, they are now able to quickly identify what drives engagement and what types of content perform best for various networks and audiences. Oktopost empowers the team to spend time in meetings digesting that information and strategizing instead of looking for a way to surface it.

"We've found that people and culture-focused content is resonating better with our target audience than cold-hearted business updates. We need to tell a story instead of pushing updates to the feed without any real context of why it matters. Oktopost is helping us pick these and other insights through our reporting mechanism and optimize the strategy as we go," Philip Tyler, Digital Lead - Marketing Communications at Lewis Silkin.

Another important discovery Oktopost brought to the social media team is that sometimes success is about micro changes and incremental developments rather than huge substantial shifts. Having a smart analytics tool like Social BI allows Lewis Silkin's marketers to understand where those marginal percentage shifts are going to come from and how they lead to calculated and steady results.