Attracting new clients is important for your bottom line. Hiring a fractional Chief Marketing Officer, CMO, is extremely beneficial to growing your law firm. A fractional CMO will be able to create and execute a marketing plan for your business, so you can focus on helping your clients win their cases.
When you have a law firm, it is especially important to build a good reputation as the go-to firm in your practice area. Whether you handle family law or worker’s compensation, you want potential clients to know your name and think of it the next time they need legal help. One of the best ways to do this is to create a marketing strategy.
What is a Fractional CMO?
A fractional CMO, or fractional chief marketing officer, is a part-time marketing officer who will lead and manage the marketing strategy of your firm. Marketing your business can be done on your own, however, without the experience and knowledge that a marketing professional has, you may not be as successful in executing your strategy.
Additionally, you are busy running a law firm so devoting your time to educating yourself on marketing takes away from how much attention you can give to your clients. Instead, a fractional CMO can handle these responsibilities for you, and if necessary, they can manage a marketing team depending on the size of your firm.
Why Marketing Will Benefit Your Law Firm
Hiring a fractional CMO will help your firm create a marketing strategy that brings in new clients and builds your business overall. However, before hiring someone to devote time and energy into your firm’s marketing, it is important to understand how marketing will help you.
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Target Ideal Clients
A marketing plan not only helps you identify who your target audience is, but it also helps you market to them specifically so that you can get the best results from your marketing efforts. If you are going to invest time and money into hiring a marketing officer, you want to be able to see a return on your investment. Targeting your ideal audience is going to help you do exactly that by bringing in new clients who actually need your services.
The first step will be to understand who your target clients are. For example, if you are an immigration lawyer, it would be a waste of time and resources to target people who are already citizens. Rather, you want to reach an audience of people who are immigrants from other countries. One way a marketing officer may help you do this is by marketing in the language that most of your clients speak, or putting out advertisements in areas where the population is largely made up of immigrants.
By identifying your typical clientele, a marketing officer will be able to create customized marketing campaigns that help spread your message to similar individuals.
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Create Clear Goals
A marketing plan starts with a clearly defined goal, as well as benchmarks to help the execution of it go more smoothly. Your marketing goals will vary depending on your situation and career goals. For example, you may want to open a second office within the next ten years, but in order to do that you need to start building your client base in a broader area. Your marketing officer can help you formulate a plan that will target new clients in the area where you would like to open an additional office.
Having clear goals will help you make the most of hiring a marketing officer, but it is important to make them attainable. A marketing officer will help you formulate more short-term goals that build up to your bigger, overall career goals.
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Better Ability to Evaluate
You can put ads out in the newspaper or make a commercial, but doing these things without the help of a marketing expert is going to make it difficult to understand exactly how effective these efforts are. Most people don’t want to waste money on marketing strategies that are not going to get them any new clients, and a CMO will be able to make sure that this is not what your firm is doing.
Marketing officers have the experience, technology, and skills to evaluate how each aspect of the plan is benefiting your business so that they can then make adjustments along the way. If one effort is not yielding the results you are looking for, they will be able to clearly see this and switch their approach to something that will be more effective.
Roni Davis is a writer, blogger, and legal assistant operating out of the greater Philadelphia area.
