CMO Chats with James Hall, Associate Director of Digital Marketing for Cooley

Can you introduce yourself?

My name is James Hall, and I’m the Associate Director of Digital Marketing at Cooley LLP.

Can you tell us a bit about your journey and what sparked your interest in marketing?

As a young child, I was always interested in design. I started my career in digital art and design, and after getting into graphic design and branding development, that’s how I started my career in marketing. After learning graphic and digital design and branding, I wanted to expand my knowledge into broader internet marketing, so I learned about social media, SEO, and more advanced marketing strategies. It all started with graphic design and led to broader internet marketing.

What does Cooley LLP do?

Cooley LLP is a global law firm with over 1,200 lawyers across 19 offices in the United States, Asia, and Europe. We have over 100 practices and industries across corporate litigation, regulatory, and IP.

As the Associate Director of Digital Marketing in your company, what is your current main marketing focus?

Great question, Marcella. My main focus is spearheading innovative web, email, and analytics solutions across our firm. This involves multiple unique web development projects, SEO optimisation strategies, email marketing optimisation and testing, and assessing multi-channel campaign performance.

Can you tell me about a particularly innovative or successful marketing campaign your team has recently executed?

Yes, of course. One that first comes to mind is in the email marketing space. Email is a very important part of our marketing strategy. We send out a lot of emails and newsletters, which are crucial for reaching our target audience. For one particular newsletter, we optimised the content by shortening it to improve the click-through rate. The newsletter originally included a lot of graphs and charts embedded in the email. We ended up extracting that long-form content, shortening it, and using it as a lead into our website. Through these optimisations and A/B testing, we were able to increase our click-through rate from 1% to 4%. We’re now taking the learnings from that newsletter and incorporating them into other newsletters we’re working on. So, that’s one campaign where we’ve seen great success.

Fantastic. Now, What are your biggest marketing challenges?

Great question. I think this is something a lot of people in digital marketing may be familiar with. Digital has so many touchpoints, and we are often onboarding new technologies and tools for analysing data. We’re looking at numbers from web, email, SEO, accessibility, and more. One of the biggest challenges is integrating all of that data in one place. We’re always striving to create dashboards that give us the full picture. As we continue to adopt new technologies, it’s a challenge to aggregate all of this data into one place to create faster insights. It’s a continuous challenge, but we’re making strides by keeping this at the forefront when adopting new technologies, ensuring they tie into the bigger picture.

How does your company stay ahead of its competitors in terms of marketing?

One thing I love about the firm is that we strive to be more like our clients than our peers. Our clients are largely innovative tech companies and startups, as opposed to big law firms. This fosters an entrepreneurial spirit in our culture, allowing creativity to flow organically. That’s one of the things that helps us stay ahead. We don’t often find ourselves competing with other law firms—we find ourselves standing alongside our clients. That’s part of our secret sauce.

What do you believe to be the biggest opportunities available to CMOs today that might not have been available in the past? 

Not to sound cliché, but of course, the evolution of AI presents so many untapped opportunities for improving processes, analysing data, and generating content. The big question now is how we can leverage AI and all its opportunities while balancing the risks and scepticism surrounding it. So, that would be one of the biggest opportunities.

I think you might have already answered this question, but what, in your opinion, does the future of marketing look like?

I think the future of marketing will be very personalised and immersive. As VR, AR, and AI continue to take the world by storm, wearable tech will become the norm, and ads will become overlaid into our environments. Right now, much of it is siloed into our devices—phones, computers—but I think the norm will shift towards wearable tech like glasses and VR headsets becoming a central part of marketing.

If you could describe the role of a CMO in one word, what would that word be and why?

I would say ‘connector’. CMOs often have to connect the dots across multiple departments and come up with solutions that take into account input from business development, leadership, lawyers or practice groups, product teams, and many other areas. A CMO has to synthesise all these different data points and turn them into a successful campaign that moves the organisation forward. So, I think “connector” is the perfect word to describe their role.

What is a piece of traditional leadership advice that you believe doesn’t apply to modern CMOs?

That’s a good question. I think one traditional piece of advice that may no longer apply is the idea that you should stick to what works and replicate it over and over. Historically, methods were very logical and streamlined, and people didn’t step outside the box often. But now, with the rapid evolution of technology and new tools, it’s crucial to step outside the box and explore unknown opportunities. CMOs today must be open-minded and willing to try new things because you never know where the next big opportunity might come from. In the past, sticking to what worked was the norm, but now there’s more opportunity to be innovative.

What career advice would you want to share with other marketing leaders out there? 

I think it goes back to my previous answer. One key piece of advice is to stay ready to pivot and never over-commit to any idea. As marketing professionals, we’re both creative and logical, and sometimes we hold on to our grand ideas. But the best advice I’ve received is to always be ready to pivot and not get too attached to any one idea—you never know what an alternative solution can bring.

Secondly, I’d say stay on top of emerging technology and tools. It can be intimidating because there’s something new every day, but it’s super important to stay ahead of the curve. Whether it’s by taking small courses or experimenting on your own, keeping up with new trends and tools is vital.

As VP of revenue marketing, what is currently your marketing focus?

My main focus is two things: at the simplest level, it’s acquiring new customers and then growing existing customers. On the acquisition side, we do that through demand generation, other acquisition channels, advertising, paid media, and such. The website, our SEO, and the self-serve funnel, as well as field marketing and events, are all focused on bringing in new customers into the funnel.

On the growing existing customer side, this is more of your growth marketing process. We’re testing and iterating across onboarding and lifecycle marketing, working with sales, and trying to create opportunities for self-serve accounts that are coming in with the opportunity to grow. I also oversee the marketing tech stack and all of our marketing operations and systems. What I try to do is get these things working in harmony. Because all of these are kind of squarely placed against the customer life cycle where we’re bringing them in, we’re nurturing and onboarding them all digitally, and then as they adopt the product and as they use more of the product, we try to grow those customers and introduce other features and products to them.

Can you tell us about a particularly memorable marketing campaign, whether it was particularly challenging or especially successful that you’ve executed recently?

Prior to DigitalOcean, I was at Google for seven years, and one of the things that really has stuck with me in, really, my whole career was during COVID when I was on Google Workspace. Team workspace is, you know, Gmail, Calendar, Doc, Slides, Meet, etc. This was when Zoom and the surge of video communication began; all of us were locked at home, and all of the chaos was going on. It was a great opportunity for Google to strategically bring Google Meet into that conversation. At the time, I was leading growth marketing for the workspace team, and we created a master class on how to get a team focused, mobilise that team, give them strategy, give them structure, and ultimately execute a really big vision.

We had maybe 50 people coming in and out of this work, streaming across daily stand-ups, regular syncs from a program management perspective, looking at metrics and reporting to leadership, and a full project scope. We had people from brand, media, the UX team, research, product, product marketing, growth marketing, sales, and even engineering sometimes. What was really, really amazing to me was that it could have been utter chaos. It could have been a complete disaster, right? You have that many people that many opinions, and that many agendas, and it wasn’t. It was just that everybody was so focused on what we were trying to do. Each person was completely content with their work stream, their tasks, and what they needed to do, and everyone had the autonomy to sort of own their own lane in the pool. That, in itself, was just amazing to be a part of. I’ve taken that with me and thought through it whenever I’m building a project team.

But the thing I was most personally proud of was on the growth side. What we did was figure out how to introduce Google Meet to existing workspace customers. So these were customers that were heavy users of probably Gmail and Calendar, maybe even docs and slides, and some of the collaborative document types. What we figured out was a way to extract some of the signals of what these customers were doing in these apps and then feed that into a predictive formula that would then introduce Google Meet at the right time. An example of this I’ll share is: let’s say you and two other folks in your workspace account are all in a document at the same time. Maybe you’re editing; you’re sort of interacting with each other. That’s a great opportunity to say, “Hey, did you know you can actually take this document and share it directly and meet and have a quick huddle? ”You can see each other. You can have a conversation. Maybe that makes your collaboration a little bit easier. There were dozens and dozens of these experiments. But it was new. It was the beginning of what would later become a more solidified, cross-functional growth process. It was just a really profound opportunity to be a part of that when the world wasn’t at its best. We all found some solitude in that process.

What are your biggest marketing challenges at the moment?

I’ll share something I think is kind of general for the industry because I think that might be more relevant. I certainly face some of these, and I think a lot of them. When I talk to friends and colleagues in marketing positions, we’re all kind of hearing and saying the same thing. But I think what’s happened is that, particularly in B2B, the buyers that we’re trying to market to are extremely fatigued. In some cases, they’re annoyed, right? They’re tuning out our marketing. I think you see that in the data. You see website traffic start to go down, and you see impressions go down. You see advertising costs go up. It’s ultimately just harder to get in front of our buyers, on top of even just understanding who our buyers are.

The second thing is that I think over the last few years we, as marketers, really kind of overdid it. We had this surplus of budget and desire to grow during COVID. And so, what did we do? We did tons and tons of webinars, tons of digital content, tons of digital media, and tons of messages nonstop. We were able to distribute this on a scale we never had. Unfortunately, what we did was just saturate the market, and now, as a result, we’ve got these buyers who are engaging less with marketing, and I think, ultimately taking the sales process into their own hands. You see all these stats where the average sales deal the buyer has already completed, like 60% of the process before they even talk to a salesperson. In some cases, they want to do it all themselves. They want to go to a review site, they want to talk to peers, they may join a community, they look at social media, and they’re already formulating their opinion before they even talk to you. That’s a key sort of risk for marketing, where we typically try to influence that thought process before they talk to sales.

On top of that, you see budgets are down. Marketers are facing lower budgets, and they’re trying to do more with less. But also, for the companies that we’re selling to, their budgets are down, right? They might be investing less in certain types of software or certain types of processes. And so, all of these things happening at once kind of create this perfect storm where it’s just become a lot harder to market, is what I think. As a result of that, I believe it’s forcing the marketers to get back to some of the basics. We need to understand who our customers are and what pain points they’re trying to solve, and then creatively explain what our product or solution does to them. This is where you’ve got to find something unique and just simply use the channels that every other one of your competitors is using in a kind of mundane way. It’s just not going to cut it, right? You really have to focus on the customer and what they’re looking for, and then build around that.

What are some common trends that you have noticed different companies capitalise on to stay ahead of their competitors in terms of marketing?

Right now, I see two things really growing: One is the rise of the B2B social influencer. You go on LinkedIn now, and it is, it’s all; it’s either founders, CEOs, CMOs, or some sort of C-level that is positioning themselves as an influencer in their industry.

Then the second is communities. You can see how these things can actually work well together. But a lot of companies are investing in the community. I think the ones that had this sort of strategy in their DNA as a company before are doing really well because they’ve already got this built-in audience. And so, as I mentioned before, it’s getting a lot harder to reach that audience through media, essentially renting it from LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, or whatever you’re using as an ad platform. If you have that built-in community, you now have a leg up. You have a community of, hopefully, your prospects and customers that you can learn from. You can do research, understand what their pain points are and what they’re looking for, and then design products, solutions, and marketing around that. So, I think influencers and communities are really important right now.

But I think the catch here is that it’s like content. Simply creating content doesn’t drive growth or performance—it has to be good content. And so, on the influencer side, I think you see some who have kind of stumbled into this, and their posts just look like promotions for their company or their product, not really creating any value. You have to be a part of the conversation; you have to join the conversation and add value to it. It’s the same thing with communities, right? If you build up a community and all you do is advertise your product to them, you’ll likely not have a community very soon. I think it’s all about how you create value across these two channels and, ultimately, how you build and win the trust of your customers and position them to consider doing business with you.

In your opinion, what does the future of marketing look like?

Oh, I love this question. I think the answer is that it’s different. It’s going to look different. I’ve already made some, like, I guess, predictions you could call them from, say, six months ago, that are stale already. I think the big thing is that AI is obviously going to change a lot of marketing. But what I’m excited about is where AI strategically gets placed in your marketing supply chain. If you think about the entire marketing process across brand, creative, demand, generation, and operations, and how you’re showing up to meet buyers in their hypothetical journey, I think that’s the key. There are so many places where it can be valuable. And what you see now is kind of the first foray into AI, which was messaging and creative. You can now build content and copy and visuals and videos and audio just super, super easy—almost too easy—to an extent, where we really do run this risk of over-saturating and already saturated market content is just becoming a lot easier to create, but also harder to find and harder to consume.

The second area is workflow management with AI agents. This is where I’m really excited because you think about all of the mundane commodity tasks that a marketer might do, even just preparing a social post. They historically, maybe, went to a copywriter to get the copy, they went to a designer to get the design, and then they went to maybe a channel owner who’s going to craft all that together and put it into the channel, click Post, and then you’ve got a person who’s going to report on that. You’ve got agents now that can do most of that, and then you’re sort of managing these agents. I think that’s really cool. It also comes with some responsibility, right? If you’re sort of hyper-accelerating with crappy messages, it’s not going to do you well, right? You still need to be creative, but what you can do is speed up the delivery process.

Then the third one I think I’m particularly fond of, and I’m really keen to learn more about, is just predictive analytics and better insight creation through AI. In my career, a kind of pre-chat GPT coming up with insights requires a data scientist. Building a predictive model required a data engineer, a data analyst, and a lot of resources, and the results were great, right? You can really understand a lot about your customers by looking at that data, but I think I imagine a world where a lot of that is automated and streamlined. As you launch a campaign, you basically feed that campaign into some machine learning or predictive model, and it’s now looking for all the things that you’ve trained it to look for. As a result, it’s giving you much faster, more real-time insights that you can take action on. It could be simple things like changing creative or changing messaging, or it might be something more along the lines of, “Hey, your most valuable customers are doing X, Y, and Z before they take that action.” And so, it’s starting now to help you understand what the buyer journey is and doing that at a way more granular level. All customers are created equal; they’re all very, very, very different. Now you have this proliferation of buyer journeys that are driven by insights, and then you can take action on that, personalize messaging, and do all that fun stuff.

If you could describe the role of a CMO in one word, what would that word be? and why?

I love this one. I think I just sort of came across this as an aha moment, but the word is servant. There’s a common description of servant leadership. As a leader, are you serving? I really want to understand what this means. There’s the leadership side, but even as a marketing team, you have to think about your role of serving customers, those on your team, your organisation, and then other areas in the company, right? Most businesses don’t succeed just because of marketing. I think you really need to be okay with that; you need to be humble that your role is to work with products, to work with product, marketing, sales, engineering, operations teams, and strategy teams, to bring the brand to life in the market, or to bring those products and solutions to market in a creative way. For me, the times where I felt the most successful are when I’ve been really tuned in to these other teams and really understand what they’re working on and what their goals are, and then I can bring that marketing perspective. Whatever it is, whether it’s from a creative side or it’s from more of an operational and growth side, either way, you know the value that you bring, and you’re working with these teams to execute.

What career advice would you like to share with other marketing leaders out there?

I thought about this one a bit, and where I landed was to control what you can control. Thinking about where I’ve been successful or felt the most successful is in the places where I didn’t get caught up in either politics, drama, changes in the organisation, or things that I just couldn’t control, right? Like, maybe the market’s down. I can’t really control that, right? But what I can control is my little slice of marketing, my team, and the people I work with.

In some cases, as I’ve personally grown through my career, most of my role changes were the result of reorganisation and new organisational design, which most people kind of commiserate around. “Oh, I don’t want this change. I don’t want to do that and this and that.” You can’t control the fact that it changed. But what you can control is how you show up, how you work with your new leader, and how you transition from the old leader. If you’re getting a new team or joining a new team, you can control how you show up there, and you can control your personality and your outlook. Those types of things, I think, go a really, really long way. I’ve tried to think about this and even the day-to-day. You can very quickly at work; just get thrown into a bunch of things that you realise you really have no control over. But find the thing you can control and just run with it. Do what you can do as well as you can, and block out what others are doing and the things that are out of your control.