Here are 15 Legal Marketing Quick Tips. To learn more about the importance of marketing to your law practice, follow this link.
Know yourself. Be clear about what you want out of life outside of your legal career. Those personal goals and plans may influence your legal marketing.
Know your law practice. Understand the types of cases you handle, the number in each practice area, the profitability of each practice area and of your firm generally.
Understand what you want. Do you want to add or drop a law practice area? What percentage of increase do you want in each area? Don’t market for legal business you don’t want (it happens). Set specific goals and a timeline in which to achieve them.
Know your ideal legal client. Be as specific as possible: age, income, social status, geographic location, financial status, etc. The more you know about your ideal client, the easier it will be to prepare a targeted marketing plan.
Do you have different law practice areas? Each practice area should be considered a distinct profit center with its own ideal client and possibly its own section in your legal marketing plan.
Know your marketing time budget. How much time, on a weekly basis, will you commit to spending on legal marketing?
Know your marketing money budget. How much money, on a yearly basis, are you are willing to spend on legal marketing?
Understand the competition. Who are you competing against? Big firms, small firms, solo attorneys, boutique firms? Compared, what are your strengths and weaknesses? How, in your marketing, can you emphasize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses?
The best source of legal business: People you already know.
The most overlooked source of legal business: Past and current clients.
Advertising-the good and the bad. The good: It works well for some consumer type law practices such as divorce and bankruptcy. The bad: it is expensive and for most legal practice areas it is not nearly as effective as personal contact and relationship marketing.
Make a prospect list. Have everyone who (within reason) could be a law client or refer a client to you in one document. It can be a spreadsheet, word document or database. The form doesn’t matter so much. What is important is that you can use this information in analyzing your prospects and preparing your marketing plan.
Get that legal marketing is a necessary, ongoing and important portion of your law practice. Give legal marketing a place of honor among your other time demands. It is more important to your long term success as an attorney than virtually anything else you can do in your law practice.
A legal marketing plan must be in writing. Random thoughts and impulsive actions don’t work. To be effective it is necessary to plan strategically, put the plan in writing and follow it faithfully and consistently.
A poor legal marketing plan followed consistently will outperform a good marketing plan followed inconsistently.
