To create awareness about the online marketing best practice for IP experts we are regularly interviewing IP experts, who are successfully using LinkedIn and other digital channels to position themselves and gain new clients via those channels. Additionally, we are showing their best practice in the online marketing Newsletter of the 🎯 IP Management Pulse and its Online Marketing Guides. Here you can find the last issues in the archive and also subscribe to never miss any of our online marketing resources. Summary of the key answers by Lennart Weiß:

  • Trust is critical in digital communication
  • IP experts need to focus on building an expert positioning for a concise topic
  • Converting online contacts to your own channels is critical to keep them in your own sphere

Background Question 1:

We are currently seeing a continuously accelerating digital transformation in the IP system. Especially in dealing with the stakeholders of the IP system as well as in the relationship and communication between attorneys and clients. As well as networking and professional exchange between IP experts, for example via social networks such as LinkedIn.

IP business academy: How do you perceive these changes?

I can see and feel this change happening. Many things can be communicated quicker, more direct and async. But there was and always will be the need for a layer of trust. This needs to be established in order to enable quick direct communication. However this band of trust only forms in two ways … for a long time when it’s only via digital channels … or in much shorter time when the is a sequence of in person meetings. 

Background Question 2:

Expert marketing refers to the targeted presentation and positioning of experts and their expertise. This includes a strong personal brand presence of the expert in the online area, in particular the creation and distribution of high-quality and useful content, and targeted lead generation. This also includes online reputation management, i.e. monitoring and positively influencing your own expert brand.

How important is your expert positioning for you and your business?

Very important for me and my business. Especially in the IP context (again) building trust is the key.  I believe you can only be a trusted expert for one thing. Therefore all efforts need to circle around this one thing.

Background Question 3:

50% of all decision-makers in business today are millennials and therefore digital natives. These are people who are used to obtaining information digitally and shopping digitally. The search behavior for specialist information has changed fundamentally in recent years. 40% of the 3.5 billion searches per day on Google are shifting to social networks and so more and more content is presented there. More and more customer journeys in the legal sector are taking place completely online.

How important do you consider online marketing to be and how important is a consistent customer journey for potential clients from social media to the website to email?

Online marketing is very important. Again I stress the “trust” point here. Trust comes from consistency. In terms of social media to website to email … I believe it’s important to “own” the access to your trustees hence there should be a clear strategy to pull leads from social media to website to email. If LinkedIn stops working tomorrow you should still be able to reach you community.

Background Question 4:

The search behaviour for experts and the initiation of personal contacts has also changed due to social distancing during the Corona pandemic and the current “new normal work“. The Google searchability of experts and their reputation is increasingly determined by their online presence. Spending on online marketing increased by 31 % last year. Designed for professional relationships, LinkedIn is growing by 15% annually with over 830 million members and is by far the most important network for legal advisors and IP experts.

Do you also observe these growth rates in client requests from your Online Marketing?

I’m on LinkedIn for 15 months now and have too little data to comment.

About the interviewee:

Lennart WeiĂź co-founded a deep tech startup in 2018 and matured the technology to publish a search engine for scientific literature in 2020. Together with his co-founder they identified their niche with patent search in 2022 and continued to bootstrap their deep tech startup in a solopreneurial way as a team of two.