A law firm marketing plan can cover a combination of digital marketing, SEO, blogs, print and digital ads. Your marketing plan can also include many. The marketing of a law firm is the practice of attracting new potential clients to your law firm. Your marketing plan can also include many other tactics, such as leveraging a law firm's marketing technology to automate various tasks.
But no matter how you approach it, marketing your company can easily consume much of your time and energy. Part of running your own law firm means learning how to run a business. In law school, lawyers are often only taught law, not the business of running their law firm. To manage your own successful legal practice business, you will need to become an expert in customer admission, accounting, office management and marketing, among many other things.
Learning legal marketing is arguably one of the most important skills you should develop when you start your law firm. It is what drives the image of your company and attracts customers to your office. From setting up analytics to email marketing for lawyers, there are many topics to cover. The end result of a law firm's marketing is to attract business.
You must plan, execute and execute campaigns that generate new leads and new cases. This includes continually investigating new emerging grievances and communicating those opportunities to their lawyers. Market research is an important part of your marketing efforts: you can't have an effective marketing campaign without a target market. Using your brand values, identify who your target market is and conduct interviews, questionnaires and focus groups to help you better understand your needs.
Marketing is everything you and your company do to promote the company and its practice areas. Marketing is all about the MESSAGES you post to the marketplace about who you are, what you do and the unique value your company offers. Marketing efforts generally benefit all lawyers in a law firm, not the individual lawyer. Law firm marketing includes all of the above, from websites and social media, to blogs, client communications, brands, and law firm public relations.
Marketing softens the market so that potential customers and reference sources know the company. When the market is familiar with your law firm and your brand, it is much easier for the next task, 100% performed by the sales force, I mean lawyers. Marketing, at its core, is the beginning of customer generation, the way you first reach potential customers, continue to nurture current customers, and re-engage in past relationships. Marketing is no longer a world of ads and slogans, but a den of experts who are constantly refining strategies using real data to find out what messages resonate with customers and through which channels those messages should be delivered.
The marketing of a law firm now means growth, since the growth of a law firm today is not just about squeezes. Ultimately, the success of your law firm's marketing efforts will depend on how well you craft your marketing mix and how well you execute it. With the right marketing team from the law firm managing its marketing execution, Attorney Lee was able to buy more time each week to plan and practice. No lawyer can offer everything to everyone, so to effectively manage your marketing strategy, focus on your strengths.
The two scenarios above summarize why lawyers and law firms need both sales and marketing to succeed. When these ethical rules create a large enough mental barrier, a firm's partners decide that the risk of violating an ethical rule surrounding a law firm's marketing isn't worth the potential of engaging in a marketing strategy. In other words, advertising agencies will say they do lawyer marketing strategies, but what they really do is help their clients place paid ads. The complicated ethical rules surrounding legal marketing can be a big mental barrier for companies that want to start or expand a marketing strategy.
Since a law firm's marketing technology can be part of your overall marketing strategy, don't forget to include those potential costs in the budget. You can hire an agency, freelancer, or other third-party vendors to handle certain marketing pieces and in-house professionals to take care of the rest. Email marketing may not be the only outbound marketing you do, but it is one of the most important. Traditional thinking would say that a law firm that uses legal marketing isn't very good, and when you're looking for a lawyer you want the best.
Word of mouth can be a great marketing tool for individual marketers, but that doesn't mean that a small legal marketing effort isn't going to be very useful. If your marketing department can't give you that simple proportion, or if your marketing company doesn't want to share that number with you, then you have a problem on your hands. Before you can start developing marketing plans for your law firm, you'll need to create a legal marketing toolkit. Marketing challenges for law firms can range from the only challenges of the legal industry to the myriad common challenges faced by every marketing team on earth.
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