Avoid making these common marketing mistakes that drag law firms down.
Running a law practice can leave you feeling like you’re juggling countless tasks. It’s something that every solo or small firm lawyer goes through. Building an effective marketing strategy is a challenge even for trained marketing professionals, which means it’s especially difficult for the attorney who has no previous experience with marketing professional services.
Understanding what you’re doing wrong can help you adjust your marketing strategy so you can put your firm back on the path to success. Here are the top five mistakes we see most firms make that prevent them from reaching their marketing goals.
1. Confusing Tactics with Strategy
You can’t put the cart before the horse. Many firms have unsuccessful marketing campaigns that focus on a tactic without considering the larger strategy.
Marketing is complex and requires that every tactic works towards the same common goal. A technique that works today is unlikely to continue to work over the long run without an understanding of how that tactic fits in with the rest of your marketing material.
In other words, if you’re publishing blog articles and as a result, there is an uptick in traffic or inquiries, then that’s great. But if you don’t have a strategy that drives those leads to hire your services, you’re wasting your time and money.
2. Consistency
When it comes to marketing, consistency is the name of the game.
A consistent look and feel to your materials, the tone of your brand language and the frequency that you produce and publish content is the only way to achieve good results.
Your marketing material creates that initial impression your leads have of your firm. Your goal is to maintain and emphasize that good impression throughout the duration of their experience.
3. Not Addressing The Pain Point
You MUST understand your ideal client’s pain point.
There are thousands of lawyers out there and your potential client could go to any of them. What makes them choose you over the competition is your ability to solve their specific issue. But if you don’t address the fact that you are the solution to their problem, then they will hire someone else.
Sometimes it helps to get an outsider’s perspective on your firm to make sure your marketing material is getting this right. Too often lawyers focus on “what” they do instead of considering “why” clients truly hire their services.
4. Not Focusing on Promotion
Your customer is just not that into you. Sorry.
They have other things going on in their lives and receive thousands of marketing messages from every day. Just because you shared a piece of content once, doesn’t mean that anyone saw it.
Here at Law Firm Suites, we share content that we’ve created several times a day and across multiple platforms. With the goal being that the more content we share, the more likely we are to run into someone whom we might be able to help.
A good rule of thumb – spend 20% of your time creating content, 80% promoting it.
5. Separating “Marketing” and “Sales” in your Mind
Lawyers are quick to lump “sales and marketing” together when discussing the organizational structure, but the two groups often work very independently.
A good marketing strategy must be tied closely to your sales strategy.
- What marketing assets do you need to create to support the overall sales cycle?
- How can marketing help to nurture a lead towards hiring your services?
It should be a red flag if you don’t see your sales and marketing efforts talking to one another.
If you’ve been making any of these mistakes, then remember that they can be easily fixed. Successful law firm marketing is not something that happens immediately and with a bit of planning, you can start seeing the results you want.
