How to manage the different levels of online marketing in your law firm
Posted on 3 November 2011
Your law firm’s website should be a great resource for your current and potential clients. Your website needs to really show your clients what your firm is all about and what the employees who work there stand for. They should start to feel they know what it would be like to work with you on a day-to-day basis and easily gain a clear understanding of where your experience lies and whether you are likely to be able to solve their problems.
A small firm or sole practitioner may be able to do achieve this through a well-planned content strategy, but large firms often struggle because they have a large and diverse client base. Large firms can find it difficult to deliver a focused message about who they are and what makes them different, and consequently end up sounding the same as their competitors. This leaves the client’s decision almost to chance, and who wants the future of their business based on chance?
The Multi-level approach
The solution is to separate out your large firm’s marketing goals and manage them at different levels of the business. The firm’s brand and reputation, along with recruitment and press relations should be managed centrally by the marketing department. This provides the platform from which more personal and specialised marketing programmes can be developed by the practice groups themselves.
Practice group marketing should focus on:
- Developing product
- Demonstrating expertise
- Building relationships.
This is in contrast to the brand-building objectives of the firm, which should be managed as aforementioned by the marketing department. Practice group marketing goals are best achieved by direct, personal, and tailored communications featuring high fee-earner involvement.
Opportunity vs. cost
Any activity that distracts lawyers from fee-earning will naturally meet resistance in most law firms because of the opportunity costs involved. Lawyers who are working on marketing aren’t billing clients or working towards billing clients, so the cost to the firm seems obvious. However, if your firm are going to rely on the fee-earner’s input into the marketing stratgey, it is clear that you need to be sure that you can reliably maximise the value of every moment spent. This means that the marketing tactics you ask them to deploy must be:
- Specific - clear about what needs to be done
- Measurable – to be sure your efforts are working
- Achievable - to guarantee participation
- Realistic - able to fit into the daily workload
- Time limited - so all involved are clear on their level of investment
A marketing machine
We hope that by reading these posts regularly, you will learn to develop a strategic digital marketing machine that delivers a consistent stream of new business enquiries for your practice group, thereby improving the brand of your firm as a whole. As always we welcome your questions and will answer them both here and within the series.
Add a Comment...
