THE CONSUMMATE LAW FIRM MARKETING PLAN DOESN’T WORK

Law firm marketing isn’t that much different than marketing any other kind of service business. Professional marketers who work in various industries see trends across different businesses giving them the edge over those marketers who only focus on one industry. They can easily connect the dots and create out-of-the-box solutions, driving increase in clients and reductions in operating expenses.

Newspaper, Radio, Popular magazines, TV and Yellow Pages are the traditional marketing plan for most law firms. If every firm is using the same playbook how are any of them different than the rest? Remember, it’s about perception at this stage of the consideration phase for potential clients.

First off, it is very difficult to measure traditional marketing, if not impossible. In a time where ROI has become a main priority, marketing managers at law firms better be able to justify why the firms marketing budget is being spent in specific media channels and show how those dollars are performing.

Traditional advertising is one of the least effective forms of law firm marketing. Most lawyers equate marketing with advertising. TV spots, radio and newspaper advertising are used to cast a wide net of awareness. But who is being made aware? How are you tracking that small percentage of leads? The truth is, you’re not. Marketing is or at least should be about strategy, whereas advertising is more about owned media and one way communications.

Here are a few reasons why traditional advertising does not work for law firms:

1. It does nothing to move a potential lead through the sales cycle.
2. Frequent advertising is very costly. A law firm marketing message must penetrate the mind of a prospect at least nine times before that prospect becomes a customer. That was the good news. The bad news is that for every three times you expose your prospect to your messaging, it gets missed or ignored two of those times. Basically, you’ve got to put the word out there a total of 27 times in order to make those nine impressions.
3. Most ads are often poorly written or not segmented properly, missing the opportunity to fulfill a particular service that is being sought out by a potential client.

Advertising has such a short shelf live in the minds of consumers nowadays. Especially in a hyper-connected world. Amplifying the great services your law firm provides is one way to set your firm apart from the rest. In a world where everyone is saying the same thing, it makes it that much easier to stand out from the crowd.

Targeting potential clients to your specific services is an intelligent way to educating and increasing leads. For example; creating a Paid Search campaign and having it supported by Organic Search as well as creating landing pages specific to potential clients that have suffered injuries in a car accident is a great way to capture those who are actively seeking a firm to represent them. You may also use shorter TV spots that mention that service, to help support your online efforts, optimizing your overall marketing mix.

I see a lot of room for improvement and creativity for law firm marketing. Taking dollars out of traditional advertising and applying it to more measurable and effective media channels such as online will help to reduce a law firms expenses and increase their conversions. A Customer Relationship Management solution will help to maintain the firms’ current database of clients as well as track the referrals made by existing clients, helping to reduce, yet again, operating expenses.

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