Top Tips On Successful Marketing For Solicitors

What Do You Need To Do To Achieve Successful Marketing For Law Firm Growth?

Legal marketing isn’t rocket science, although we have to concede it isn’t easy either.

Overcome Objections To Marketing At Your Law Firm

For successful marketing for solicitors the first thing you need to do is to have a mandate. There will always be plenty of objectors out there as to why legal marketing won’t work at your law firm and why you shouldn’t do it. So get support, get a sponsor and have a mandate to push through these objections and demonstrate why marketing can add real value to your legal practice. If you are still struggling with objections check out our blog ‘The Top 10 Objections to Marketing at your Law Firm’, and hopefully this will give you a bit more ammunition.

Get A Team In Place To Support Your Lawyers' Marketing Activities

Whether or not you have a marketing department in place, you need an effective team in order to deliver successful marketing campaigns. Always remember that even if you do have a marketing team already, marketing isn’t the sole preserve of the marketing department - everyone owns marketing and to be successful you need to involve people right across your Practice.

On the flip side of this, you also need to have some marketing expertise, whether this from your own in-house marketing team, a marketing agency experienced in dealing with law firms, or both. Assemble a team of enthusiastic and committed people who believe that this stuff actually works.

Whilst some great marketing has come from this approach be aware that just because your PA organises the annual client drinks at Christmas doesn’t make them a natural born marketer, likewise, just because someone has a marketing degree doesn’t mean they are the world’s best marketer either. Judge everyone on their merits and capabilities!

Establish Marketing Processes Quickly

Okay, so you have agreement at a high level to engage in marketing activities at your law firm and you have a group of like-minded individuals who are committed to making it work, surely that’s enough, isn’t it?

Not so fast!

You need a process to manage, record and measure all your marketing activities. Don’t run headlong into everything without making sure your processes are sharp... and continually review and amend them to make things even better next time.

Marketing process is a critical success factor for your marketing efforts so make sure you nail them quickly.

For example, for every major marketing activity you do make sure you put in place:

• Approval processes;
• A detailed marketing calendar of activities;
• Metrics to record what has or hasn’t worked;
• Project plans;
• Timelines; and
• Budgets

Make sure you always gather feedback, whether this is from attendees at an event or an internal post-implementation review to assess a project’s success. This isn’t designed to apportion blame or stifle creativity, it is there to ensure that things happen effectively, work properly and establish a constant feedback loop for continuous improvement. Check out our blog on the '9 Costly Mistakes When Redesigning Your Law Firm Website'.

Where Did That Marketing Budget Go?

Running any marketing endeavour without a budget in place is dangerous work. Once you have your plan make sure to cost it out and agree a budget. This will help focus the mind and will avoid those awkward conversations with the firm's finance committee trying to explain where all the money went.

Generate Lots Of Ideas To Get Your Law Firm's Marketing Off The Ground

Yes, after all this pontificating about how we need to do things to market your law firm successfully, we need to work out and agree what it is we are actually going to do.

There are so many things you can do to market your law firm successfully - on one hand you need to work out how to do things, but on the other you need to work out what to do. For a good list of ideas to get you started check out our blog on the ‘Top 10 Marketing Ideas for your Law Firm’.

After All This You Still Don't Have A Marketing Plan?

When you start pulling this all together you will realise that you need a marketing plan. Some law firms agonise over their marketing plan for months and never get it finished but rather than drafting such a large academic document, jot down:

• Where you are now
• What objectives you want to achieve
• How you are going to achieve these objectives
• What you will do specifically
  
• Timings and budgets

If you can start to do this you will be well on your way to a more collaborative, efficient, well-managed, structured and successful approach to marketing for your law firm. Surely this is the start of your law firm's marketing efforts driving the successful growth of your practice?

Why not download our FREE GUIDE ‘How To Write A Law Firm Marketing Plan To Grow Your Practice’ for more ideas on exactly what you need to do to get marketing on the right road for your legal practice.

How do you market successfully at your law firm? Does anyone think that marketing for solicitors is important? Have you any stories to share or do you agonise over your marketing activities and are concerned they aren’t making the grade? Feel free to add your feedback below on what works for your law firm or get in touch if you would like to discuss how you can improve the success of marketing at your firm.

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