Four Things the Marketing Department Must Manage
Posted on 10 November 2011
At Isaac Parker, we generally advocate that digital marketing should be organised around practice groups and feature a high degree of fee-earner involvement. However, there are some things that absolutely must be managed centrally, ideally by a dedicated marketing department.
1. Overall marketing strategy
When marketing is decentralised as we recommend, there is a danger that it can become fragmented and pull the firm in conflicting directions. To counter this, practice group marketing should flow from a well-crafted central marketing strategy so that the activities of each practice group contribute to an integrated and coherent whole.
The central marketing strategy should set out clearly:
- How you will identify qualified clients
- Whether you are a value or volume firm and how you should target your marketing accordingly
- What services in your product portfolio are you focussing on and how they are different from competing firms
- What tools and tactics your firm will use
- Headline goals for growth and client satisfaction
2. Your Brand’s Visual Identity
Visual identities get stronger through consistent usage. We strongly advocate that the application of the firm’s visual identity be tightly controlled by the central marketing function. Marketing departments have the responsibility to ensure that sub-branded products can be created by practice groups, providing them with logos and branding tools where necessary. Marketing brand guidelines should provide a framework of rules to ensure an identity which is consistent with that of the main firm.
No fee-earning lawyer should ever be forced to do battle with technology. The purchase, implementation, and ongoing support of the technology needed to market a firm online should be managed centrally by support services.
4. Recruitment
For law firms, people are the product, and recruitment can be thought of as the first stage in the manufacturing process. Much like a confectioner might offer the public factory tours to demonstrate the quality of his product, the recruitment process acts as a powerful promotional tool for law firms. Obviously, the actual process of recruitment is the domain of human resources, but the way it is presented to the world at large is very much a marketing task. Are you presenting your firm in the right way by telling the world what you are looking for in new recruits?
In this series of introductory posts you have learned:
- How digital marketing has changed the game of advertising, allowing strategy to win over expenditure
- How simple but effective practice group-level marketing will guarantee you a consistent, measurable stream of new business queries
- How your law firm’s website and sub-website marketing strategies need to be managed centrally by the marketing department but fed down into practice groups for content
- How fee-earners need to contribute to marketing but how they can do this in a time and cost-effective manner
- How marketing departments can be most effective and which areas they should focus on
In the next collection of posts we will look at the steps you will need to go through to plan a digital marketing campaign for your practice group, starting with how to develop and define your product. We look forward to your questions will aim to answer them here and address them within the next series.
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