3 tips to win the lawyer marketing race
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For most lawyers, marketing sucks. We didn’t go to law school to make cute websites and suspense-filled legal updates. No, we went to school to write sexy contracts and embarrass ourselves before judges.
But seriously, very few lawyers enjoy engaging in legal marketing. Even fewer lawyers actually have the time and resources to market effectively due to the never-ending chaos involved in serving our clients.
If you have the passion for legal marketing (or just want to do it well to make some cash), I have some tips that should help you not only compete but also excel in the marketing race. In particular, in this post, you will learn to:
Take your marketing to the next level by switching from sprinting to marathon running
Dramatically increase your chances of success by avoiding individual events and focusing on team relays
Consistently improve your performance by tracking your performance
I. Prefer Marathons over Sprints
If you examine the marketing of a typical lawyer, you will notice that it is eerily similar to the behavior of a sprinter. In other words, we typically try to get any marketing activities over as quickly as possible - the shorter, the better. This behavior is completely understandable when you consider that our main responsibility is to service the needs of our clients. In this context, marketing can feel like an annoying disturbance from our main job.
However, when you engage in marketing like a sprinter, you typically miss out on the true benefits of marketing, benefits that only accrue at the next level. For example, if you decide to engage in a thought leadership campaign, you probably sprint to the finish by throwing out a few interesting blog posts or articles. What are the chances that this production is going to get you a valuable conversation with a potential client or key referral source? Next to zero.
But, think about what might happen if you take things to the next level and extend your run just a little bit more? For example:
Level 2: What if you discovered that one of your posts/articles is getting much more interest than the others (e.g. more views according to Google Analytics or more likes from Linkedin)? In that case, you could do the following:
fancy up the post/article by getting it published somewhere or growing it into a report
send the publication or report to your key clients and target clients
if they are interested, offer to meet for a coffee to discuss your insights and their questions (and look for work opportunities)
Level 3: What happens if you actually get some positive feedback from key clients and target clients regarding your publication or report? Keep on running as follows:
fancy up your publication or report by transforming it into a client breakfast seminar
invite your key clients and target clients in for the seminar
follow up the seminar by inviting the participants for one-on-one lunches to get their feedback (and look for work opportunities)
Level 4, 5, 6, 7, 8…: Keep running the race and repackaging your insights to maximize the value out of your initial marketing investment.
II. Prefer Team Relays over Individual Events
Although the legal profession tends to be made up of lone wolves, you aren’t going to win any marketing competitions by fighting on your own. If you want to win at marketing, you need to leverage the marketing efforts of everyone in your practice group. To understand this, let me give you a simple comparative example:
Lone Wolf Visibility: You publish on your firm’s website three blog posts. To get people to read the post, you also share each of your posts on your Linkedin Page (with 1,000 connections). How many people are actually going to (i) view your post and (ii) read your article? Let’s say on average 1,200 people view your post and 20 people read your article.
Practice Group Relay Visibility: Let’s say you do the same thing as the Lone Wolf. But, you and your ten practice group colleagues regularly share each others posts on their Linkedin Pages. Assuming that each of your 10 colleagues also has about 1,000 connection, how many people on average are going to (i) view your post and (ii) read your article? I am willing to wager that the answer is closer to 5,000 views and 50 people reading your article.
In other words, when you market as a team, your teammates can act as a force multiplier for you marketing efforts.
Even more important, you really need a team to take your marketing past the first level of marketing (i.e. to get beyond the simple sprint stage). If you want to get beyond the first level, you need to produce a sufficient amount of marketing content to choose from in order to ensure that you are utilizing quality content at the next level. If you are only choosing amongst your three posts, you will find it difficult to find the content that stands out. However, if you are comparing the thirty posts by you and your colleagues, you won’t find it too hard to identify one or two super pieces that can be strategically used to get you closer to clients.
III. Track Your Performance
None of us are born legal marketers. In fact, we all start out as pretty shitty legal marketers. The difference between a successful legal marketer and a failure is that the successful marketer has learned from his/her mistakes.
It’s difficult for lawyers to learn from their marketing mistakes because we spend our time sprinting from marketing piece to marketing piece without stopping to consider whether these pieces are truly working. But, if you truly want to learn from your mistakes, you need to start tracking the performance of your marketing.
Tracking means, for example:
Checking your Google Analytics to see which of your marketing pieces gets 0 or next to 0 views. (Note: If no one is reading your writing, this is a marketing mistake. You need to investigate the cause and avoid repeating the mistake in the future.)
Checking with your practice group after a client seminar to discover that there are 0 or next to 0 follow up meetings. (Note: If you can’t generate any client contact after a seminar, this is a marketing mistake. You need to investigate the cause and avoid repeating the mistake in the future).
IV. OK, so what am I trying to sell you?
To summarize, if you want to win the lawyer marketing race, I highly recommend that you focus on the following steps:
Set up multi-stage marketing campaigns that constantly focus on getting you into closer contact with clients
Leverage your entire department’s marketing to boost your visibility and identify the best content for taking to the next-stage
Introduce and regularly monitor a tracking system that will help you identify and investigate your mistakes
At Evelaw, we know that the above steps are difficult for lawyers. That’s why we help practice groups outsource them as follows:
We can set up and manage your practice group’s marketing campaigns, ensuring that they get to the next level.
We can organize your group’s social media posts to maximize visibility and pinpoint the best content for the next level.
We can set up a tracking system for your group’s content and provide regular reports and insights to speed up the improvement of your content.
Contact us to learn more about how we can help your group’s marketing.