Tactics without Strategy is the noise before Defeat - Sun Tzu
OK, you want to have your law firm start marketing…How much do you want to spend? What tactics do you want to use? What is the expected outcome? How do you measure success?
These are all valid questions. To understand this and know where to start, your firm must develop a marketing strategy, just like any other business entity in a similar situation, rather than arbitrarily throwing money at a printed piece, a mailing, or SEO activities.
So, now the question is where do you start and what does a marketing strategy look like? Below are the general components of a marketing strategy.
General Marketing Strategy Components
- Problem Statement: The first step in developing a marketing strategy is to identify the problems that the firm is trying to solve. These problems could be as varied as not having the phone ring, not getting many customer referrals, to not getting the types of cases and clients that you want. Having an understanding of the types of problems you currently face is the best starting point in putting a plan together. Furthermore, it ensures that you are not reacting to gut feel.
- “Why” Statement: Understanding and articulating why your firm exists is the second step in building your plan as it helps you truly prioritize what’s important to you. This is where many firms struggle because often, they want to be all things to all people – i.e. “I want my firm to both do general auto accident cases as well as find Qui Tam cases”, which requires a very different strategy than just focusing on Qui Tam cases. This is where many firms need to be careful and honest with themselves and prioritize truly what their focus is and what they want their marketing strategy to accomplish.
- High-Level Goals: Simply stated, these are goals that you want to accomplish given your Problem Statement and your Strategic Vision (your “Why” Statement). For instance, if your Problem Statement is that you are getting minimal referrals, and your Why Statement prioritizes your Qui Tam practice and you recently hired an experienced Qui Tam lawyer, you may want to focus on developing a list of customers, attorneys, and local business leaders where you can target this audience with specific Qui Tam messages from your Qui Tam attorney. These messages could be in the form of mailers, emails, webinars, etc. Other examples of high-level goals could be to better understand where your cases are coming from, which could require a more robust intake process or better website engagement which could require more, more engaging, and fresher website content.
- Actionable Goals: Now that you have identified your High-level Goals, you should start to develop actionable, relevant, and time-bound goals which drive your specific activities. For instance, if you’ve recognized that your website is not driving sufficient traffic and your High-Level Goal is to improve the content on the site, this actionable goal should be focused on creating so many new pages of specific content within so many days or weeks, and who is responsible for doing it.
- Target Audience: Who is your target audience. Please note, it is not everyone! As a starting point, you probably need to determine if your focus is on your potential clients, other attorneys (referral partners) or people in other professions (also as referral partners). Even this is not enough. For instance, when thinking about other attorneys, should they practice a similar type of law, of another type? Are they in your local bar association or alumni from your same law school? Are they local or located in other parts of the state or country. These decisions, while they sound easy to make, do have a profound impact on how you are branding your firm and how you will market your practice. But and this is important, you can have multiple target audiences, but you will have different strategies and probably leverage different tactics for each.
- Brand Message: Have you ever seen billboards or TV ads for PI attorneys? Some claim to be the biggest, some claim to be more experienced, some claim to have the best results, and some claim to be the best litigators. Whether you are a PI law firm, a divorce lawyer, or practicing any other type of law, most likely you need to adapt a brand message that helps you differentiate from your competition. Sometimes this is the hardest part of building a marketing strategy, but the reality is that you need a brand message that is consistent with your website and your other marketing efforts. It needs to be authentic and should have an impact on the rest of your marketing strategy. For instance, if you are a divorce lawyer that focuses on “men’s rights”, then this will very much have an impact on the other aspects of your strategy.
- Marketing Tactics: Simply put, marketing tactics are actions that make specific strategies achievable. There are dozens, if not hundreds of marketing tactics available for a law firm to use. Some examples of marketing tactics include publishing blog articles, posting on social media, leveraging SEM (search engine marketing), sending direct mail, and hosting webinars. Discussing the pros and cons of each marketing tactic is beyond the scope of this article but suffice to say that in this day and age, most every firm should be employing digital marketing tactics – strong performing website with continually updated content, some combination of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). Further, most firms will also benefit from a robust referral strategy – whether targeting past clients, other lawyers, or other professionals. On top of these foundations, you may also want to focus on social media marketing (including LinkedIn), some amount of PR, advertising, speaking engagements, etc. Also note that each type of tactic will have different costs associated, and many tactics can be done by a knowledgeable attorney without the help of an external consultant.
- Measurements: What is the Return on Investment (ROI) and how do you calculate it. There are several ways to measure ROI but to be clear, it needs to be measured. The most practical way to calculate ROI for most law firms is to view it in terms of new intake / clients. If you typically get five (5) new clients per month on average, and start a marketing program that drives 10 more clients per month, you know that your marketing is working. From here you probably need to assign a standard value per new client and compare this to the incremental cost of the marketing program. While this isn’t overly scientific, most law firms do not get immediate revenue or billable hours to compare. As I have always said, you want to understand the ROI so you can do more of what is working and less of what isn’t.
How to Start
OK, this is the million-dollar question, right? Hopefully by going through the above thought process and maybe doing some outside research, you have a good idea of what you want to do, who you want to target, and what your message is. This said, it’s important that even if everyone in your firm is not participating in the marketing plan, everybody is aware, and expectations are set. Our advice is to start small with a few tactics, getting into the groove of what needs to be done and the process of learning more about the “craft” and understanding the performance and ROI. For instance, if you are embarking on a digital strategy, start with a well-written, strong performing website with reasonable on-page SEO (look it up). Start measuring performance as well as key website metric such as Unique Visitors, Time-on-Page, etc. You will probably see that some pages perform better than others. This lets you know that you probably want to attempt to improve the on-page SEO on the lower performing pages. You also want to get in the habit of creating more “good” content that you can add to your website. You may find that this is all you need from your website tactics. However, you may decide to start with some ad words (SEM) to drive more visitors to specific pages, but again if you spend more money on SEM to drive more visitors but don’t convert them to clients, the ROI probably isn’t there. Again – do something, understand the return, course correct, and repeat.
Good Luck!
