Spending more time on your law firm marketing may not be an option in your already over-committed professional life. By carefully examining where your clients have come from, you can make informed adjustments to your marketing plan to significantly improve the productivity of your limited marketing time.
If part of your strategic plan for 2014 is to make more money than you did last year, then you’re going to have to do something about your law firm’s marketing strategy.
But for many of you — who are probably already struggling to balance marketing time with billable time — making more money this year may not be as simple as spending more time on marketing.
If your practice is anything like the self-employed attorneys in Law Firm Suites’ NYC shared office space, you’re already spending a good portion of your time on marketing activities and, after factoring in getting client work done, you have little additional time to give.
This year, if you have any chance of seeing a material increase in profits, you have two choices:
- You can hire an associate to free up more of your time to do marketing. But in all likelihood, your small law practice will not support the extra expense.
- Or, you can take what limited marketing time you have now, and make it produce much better results. This will require you to choose marketing activities where you’ll see the biggest return for the time that you invest.
For the typical small firm attorney, the second option is probably the only viable one.
Look to where your clients came from to pick the best marketing strategies for your firm.
But, of all the different marketing techniques available to small firm lawyers, how do you choose the 2 or 3 activities that will generate the most business for your law practice?
For most of you, the answer will come directly from taking a close look at where – exactly — your existing clients came from.
Today I’m going to show you how you can build a simple Excel spreadsheet to quickly review your firm’s client revenue information to make critical marketing decisions in your firm. I’ll tell you what numbers you should be looking and how to make sense of them.
Two videos to walk you through how to drill down on client revenue data to make smart marketing choices.
I thought it may be most productive if you can see a demo of an actual spreadsheet (one I use for my own law firm). I also wanted to walk you through how I used this spreadsheet to make material changes to my own law firm marketing plan.
So I recorded a screen-share video that I posted to YouTube in two parts.
In part 1 of the video, I will discuss:
- How to set up this spreadsheet in 30 minutes and what information you’ll need to get started.
- What data you should be keeping track of.
- Simple calculations will be most helpful and why.
- How you can accurately predict how much repeat business your clients will do this year.
In part 2 of the video, I will discuss:
- How to increase revenues by focusing on your firm’s most profitable cases.
- How to boost profits by focusing energy on the most productive referral sources.
- How to pick the 2 to 3 marketing campaigns that will generate the most revenue for the time you spend.
Make your law firm marketing efficient, and see immediate results.
You probably have some ideas about where your clients are coming from already, but trust me, when you drill down on the numbers, you may be surprised at how much time you are wasting on marketing activities that are ineffective.
Fix that, and there will be no limit to how big you can grow your firm.
This article is the second of a 2-part series about making strategic marketing plans for the New Year. Last week we discussed how to use your firm’s profit & loss statement to make law firm marketing plans that have a chance of meeting your firm’s revenue goals.
About Marketing Mondays
Marketing Mondays is a weekly blog series written by corporate attorney and Law Firm Suites founder, Stephen Furnari. Written for solo and small firm attorneys. It focuses on real-world marketing strategies that have been executed successfully by small firm attorneys to attract and retain new clients, including those with offices in Law Firm Suites’ NYC shared office space.
