How a B-to-B Lawyers' Bank Gave Its Marketing a More Personal Touch

A bank that lends only to lawyers already meets an incredibly specific demand. Targeting those litigators individually makes it personal. When Adweek last checked in with legal lender Esquire Bank, it had teamed with creative agency Park & Battery to launch an award-winning Better Call Saul-inspired campaign that sought out trial lawyers where they worked. However, when it isn’t helping lawyers finance their cases—which account for 70% of Esquire’s business—the digital bank dabbles in payment processing and commercial real estate. As the bank attempts to expand nationwide, it’s had to diversify its marketing strategy to meet its customers’ similarly divergent needs. Kyall Mai, svp and chief innovation officer at Esquire, noted that lawyers can be a tough crowd—they’re busy winning cases and aren’t incredibly receptive to sales pitches. As a result, Esquire began investing in technology from ZoomInfo, Dun & Bradstreet and others to create a content marketing strategy that figures out how to send personalized messages to the right person at the right time. How Park & Battery Made a B-to-B Campaign That Would Make Saul Goodman Proud After using traditional sales leads to generate business from 2005 through 2019—sponsoring trade association events and conducting in-person sales—it began using marketing technology to create basic personalization while using the same digital communication with all of its law firms. By 2020, Esquire began segmenting firms based on traits like the size of its workforce. By 2021, Esquire was breaking down firms by their customer attributes and personas. Last year, it launched email campaigns that were personalized to each firm—and received responses that were three to four times the industry standard. It’s currently working on personalizing all of its online properties, from bank webpages to its Lawyer IQ content hub that features business insights that aren’t necessarily covered in law school. Esquire just announced that it’s expanding its partnership with Salesforce to use their artificial intelligence to ensure that what lawyers see when they visit the bank’s site is exactly what they need. Adweek spoke with Mai about Esquire’s marketing strategy, hyper-personalization and why even a digital strategy needs a human touch in the legal world. Adweek: When Salesfore personalizes an Esquire website so it’s relevant to a particular lawyer, what is that personalization based on? Is it where they've been, previous visits to Lawyer IQ, how we've filled out forms with Esquire before, previous history? Mai: All of the above. It is not purely based on website browsing history. We're building an affinity in the back end that combines scores and AI to figure out the next best article recommendation. We know that lawyers that look after personal injury cases—slip-and-fall—they're interested slip-and-fall cases as opposed to divorce cases. So sending the lawyer relevant and timely messages using scoring analytic AI and previous browsing history is the reason why we chose the Salesforce technology, because all of the data lives in one place and it can be fed into the hyper-personalization recommendations. What Creativity in B-to-B Marketing Looks Like Today It's not just the Lawyer IQ website that is going to be consuming that personalization recommendation: We're talking about salespeople sending an email out where, in the email, there's recommended content based upon someone's affinity toward particular types of content. All of the data living in one place allows us to feed these recommendations at different stages of the marketing and the sales cycle, which really helps with our customer engagement and also helps with our win ratios and customer acquisition. Esquire has noted that 50% of all new law firm leads are coming from its digital marketing. How is that changing the way Esquire acquires new business? We've noticed that the sales cycle has gotten shorter because we're giving people relevant content. When prospects are having interactions with our staff members, they already know who we are. They already thought about our products and services. They've already seen some of their competitors using our products. Esquire already tailored its business to a degree by limiting its banking and lending to lawyers. After going even deeper into the personalities within that small pool, how has Esquire’s content strategy changed and how has its technology adapted? Earlier on, when the market didn't know who we were, it was very much a brand-awareness scenario. (Now,) 75% of the lawyers that we know are in our target audience are self-financed—they're using their own money in order to grow their law firms, because they don't realize that there are much more effective ways of using leverage to grow their law firm. Part of the problem is similar to what maybe the first bank that offered mortgages had. That bank would have struggled to convince people to borrow money to buy a house—everyone would have just saved up their money to buy the house. In a very similar vein, a lot of lawyers just save up their money to grow their contingency-fee law firm. We're trying to teach them the benefits of a problem they don't actually know they have. So a lot of our content marketing started with testimonials, other lawyers talking about how they've grown using Esquire bank. Southwest Airlines and Grammarly Turn B-to-C Strengths Into B-to-B Success As we evolved over time, we laid in more knowledge leadership articles: about how you should spend your marketing dollars, accounting topics that are relevant to your law firm, generic business management topics. But the one thing we also learned that's quite different from other banks, that we're doing with the help of Park & Battery, is a strong content atomization strategy. When we create one core asset, we've got scores of mini assets underneath it. We've also started to use AI technology to help us do some of those things. We understand that AI content writing and copywriting technology will never create the final product for you, but it's fantastic at helping you atomize content into many different smaller pieces and fantastic at helping you write outlines for a lot of those atomized pieces. That's been a core part of our content strategy, because when you're adopting hyper-personalization technology, you need a lot of content. Otherwise, you don't have much to say to match content to the right person at the right time. With the death of cookies, how is Esquire culling enough first-party data to use alongside its marketing technology and fuel that hyper-personalization? When Apple made changes, and everyone was worrying about the cookieless world, we originally looked at the macro changes and thought to ourselves, “Gee, we’re lucky we've had a first-party data acquisition and enrichment strategy from the start.” When we invested in Salesforce, we also invested heavily on data, and we continue to invest heavily in data. Blending B-to-B and B-to-C Marketing Has Been Priceless for Mastercard In the b-to-b space, what’s quite nice is you're allowed to acquire b-to-b data. So we were partnering with companies like ZoomInfo and Dun & Bradstreet to acquire basically the entire database of every single law firm in the country. And then we also use different agencies to enrich the data with data points that we care about, because someone like ZoomInfo and Dun & Bradstreet are great at a ZIP code level, they're fantastic on an employee-size level, but we want trucking litigation law. We want to know, "They did dog bites, trucking litigation, divorce, etc." We sent data to get enriched and then imported into our database so that we had all these unique segmentation variables for our tools, our analytics, our AI, our hyper-personalization. In addition to that, we have different lead magnets all across Lawyer IQ, which feed more data points into our system, which then get digested by the hyper-personalization engine. There’s been concern that AI would lead to a more logical, rote approach to b-to-b marketing as algorithms try to sell to accounts. However, some in the b-to-b sector have argued that it may lead to more emotional marketing as it recognizes the people and human behaviors behind the decision-making process. Considering the more personal nature of Esquire’s business as it relates to litigators handling personal injury and divorce, how has Esquire's tech-based approach driven its emotional message? We totally like to do our marketing from a different lens and perspective. The “Don’t Be Sorry, Call Ari” campaign is totally unlike anything that other banks do. We recognize the emotive aspects of not only marketing, but catching people's attention and being able to communicate that we totally understand their business problems and pain, because ultimately, although we're b-to-to selling to a person, the more you know about the person's personal aspirations, goals and motivation, the better you're going to go.