We see law firms either pumping out tons of publication articles OR feeling bad about not doing the same thing. But, did anyone think to stop and ask: “Why are we doing this?” (Or more honestly, is all this crap really making us visible to clients?)

Are you the sucker at the table?

If you are not asking “Why are we doing this?”, you are probably throwing away your money and, more importantly, the valuable time of your lawyers. Even worse, you are like the sucker at the poker table who only realizes too late that he is the sucker.

In this post, you can read about three important tips that will not only help you avoid being a sucker in the world of law firm marketing but also enable you to boost the visibility of both yourself and your firm’s brand. In particular, you can improve your marketing by answering the following three questions:

Why am I doing this type of marketing?
Who is the target of my marketing?
What information do my targets want to receive from my marketing?

Why am I doing this type of marketing?

Before you do any type of marketing, you would be wise to set up concrete goals for your work. Let’s first start with addressing the question: “What is not concrete?” You are not being concrete if your only goal is to either: (i) boost the market’s awareness of your firm; or (ii) make your firm simply more visible. These are the goals of invisible firms.

Three Concrete Goals

On the other hand, you are starting to create concrete goals, if you say the something like the following:

I want more money
I want more clients
I want to have better rankings

If you can provide such simplistic answers, it’s much easier to craft a targeted marketing approach for yourself. For example:

If you want more money, then you should probably focus your marketing on your current clients. (It’s a lot faster and easier to get money from your existing clients.)
If you want more clients, then you should probably focus your marketing on your referral resources. (If you are like 90% of lawyers, you are mostly getting your clients from referrals.)
If you want to get better rankings, you should probably turn your focus from marketing and instead think about client service initiatives (e.g. client surveys). (You can boost your ratings more quickly if you just make sure that your service is exceeding client expectations.)

Who is the target of my marketing?

You are definitely acting like a marketing sucker if you are trying to market to everyone. (In the marketing game, if you are marketing to everyone, then you are marketing to no one.)

Target Categories

Instead, you need to make sure that you are at least marketing to specific categories of targets (i.e. buyer personas). For example, you could identify the following types of categories:

target industry
target market
target companies
target employee roles (e.g. CLO vs. COO vs. CFO)

Live Targets

Better yet, you are destined to make amazing marketing if you can actually identify the specific people that you are aiming at. For example:

The lady at your former client who refers 30% of your new clients.
The general counsel working at your dream target client.
The lawyer in your network who is regularly sending you work.

What information do my targets want to receive from my marketing?

When you are writing your marketing articles, you are most likely making the mistake that all writers make. You are writing from your perspective (as opposed to the perspective of your readers). As a result, you might be pumping out content that feels great to you, but is just a time waster for your targets.

Target Research

Instead, before you start to writing, make sure to first identify the interests of your targets. For example, you could identify interests with the following types of exercises:

grab a coffee with a target and candidly ask them about what they actually read, including what types of publications
do a survey of your targets asking them to rank certain topics that you are interested in writing about
research the Linkedin pages of your targets and look at the types of posts that they are liking and writing

Based on this research, you will be in a much greater position to craft content that your targets want to read. As a result, you will definitely boost your visibility.

Final Thoughts

Do you find the above tips useful for boosting your firm’s visibility? Let us know in the comments section.

If you would like help with ramping up your firm’s visibility, let us know by clicking here to access our contact page.

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Is your law firm invisible to clients? [3 tips to boost visibility]