The #1 complaint we hear from lawyers is that they don’t have the time to market their legal services. As legal marketers, we hear you and understand your concerns.
Let’s go ahead and alleviate some of your woes right now: we are not about to ask you to devote 20 hours a week to marketing. You have billable hours to meet, and we’re here to SIMPLIFY marketing, not overwhelm you with marketing.
What if we told you that there is a way to make a super simple marketing plan that will actually work for you this year, and that it’s all right here?
Let’s take a look at the four steps you need to take to develop an effective and easy marketing plan you’ll actually stick with while avoiding a few common pitfalls lawyers often make.
Law Firm Marketing Starts with Identifying Your Target Audience
Not up for reading? Skip to the video.
This one sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised to hear how many clients answer this question with the widest and most unrealistic net they can possibly cast: “EVERYONE.”
While it would be nice to convert every single person in the world to a client, that’s just not how it works, right? Think about it.
Why You Shouldn’t Target Everyone with Your Law Firm Marketing
Your client’s ability to pay you, matters.
You want to be sure the people you target can actually afford your services. And let’s face it, this means not everyone can be your client.
Your client’s needs matter.
You don’t want to target someone who doesn’t need your services. For example, if you’re a divorce attorney, you don’t want to target someone who is happily married, unmarried, and/or already divorced. Why would you spin your wheels trying to reach them?
Not everyone is going to like you.
Another reason why not everyone is your target goes back to a grade school lesson that might have been a tough pill to swallow but was quite liberating once you realized: not everybody has to like you. Believe it or not, one of your strongest selling points in your legal marketing tactics is that you won’t be the right fit for every single person on the planet. And that’s a good thing.
How to Identify Your Target Audience for Your Law Firm Marketing
Now that we know you aren’t, in fact, targeting everyone in your marketing strategy, let’s talk about who you ARE going to target and how to identify them.
Think back on your past clients and ask yourself what makes someone your ideal target audience?
Are they male, female, married, divorced, in their 30s, a business professional, own a home, have a dog, have kids, don’t ever want kids, a veteran, etc.?
The key to effectively nailing down your target audience is to get specific. You can’t effectively speak to someone whose identities and needs you don’t know.
Speaking of speaking…
Create a Clear and Convincing Message Tailored to Your Clients
Most of the time, the goal of marketing in the legal industry is to convince a person to hire you for their specific legal issue, right? Notice we said convince…
We see so many mistakes around messaging, but the most common ones are these two:
You Propose on the First Date (Try to Sell Your Legal Services from the First Encounter with a Prospective Client)
Huh? We’re not talking about marriage. So, what do we mean by this?
We see so many social media posts on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. in which a law firm or lawyer is asking their prospective client to become their client without first even introducing themselves.
We’ve seen so many social media posts that try to convince a prospective client to hire before first explaining why they should. This is the equivalent of proposing on the first date.
You Claim to Be a Great Lawyer for Doing the Bare Minimum that is Required
The message of “hire me now, we fight for you” actually goes against everything a good lawyer stands for.
Nobody wants to hire a law firm that doesn’t invest in and fight for them. That’s the point of hiring a lawyer… an advocate. Your #1 job is to fight for your clients. In fact, you have a fiduciary duty to fight for them. So, scrap the language that conveys unwillingness to try.
An immediate “hire me now” message is also very self-serving and doesn’t explain WHY your prospective client should hire you. Anything to the contrary is lazy, bad, and awful marketing tactics.
Instead of the self-serving message of urgency with little supporting information on your law firm and legal services, write for your audience’s needs. Try something like, “Gordon Law Firm. We help families navigate divorce without devastation. Contact us today to learn more about our services.”
This approach conveys so much with very few words and lets your audience know you care, are helpful, and most of all that you understand how difficult it is to be in their shoes.
Who would you rather hire? The attorney who will “fight for you” or the one who will “help you navigate divorce without devastation”?
We’re going with the legal practices who understand us and want to help, and your target audience will, too.
Take Your Message to the Legal Market
This is the part where we see most law firms look to their peers and copy and paste their strategy and plan. They say, “Oh, Gordon Law Firm is posting on Instagram, so I should be too.”
Look, we get it. Law School is a constant comparison of what others are doing for the better or worse, and it’s easy to get in the habit of comparison as a strategy, but it’s just not the right strategy for your law firm marketing efforts.
Copying and pasting someone else’s marketing plan is a recipe for disaster. While you had grades and rankings as metrics in law school in your comparison tactic, you don’t know if another legal practice has a savvy marketer or an idiot helping them.
So, instead of making a lot of baseless presumptions about what social media platforms you need to use in your marketing strategies, we strongly suggest looking at real data.
Why Your Marketing Data Matters
Your law firm website and analytics are the perfect place to start when doing this analysis.
Your marketing department and/or consultant should also be sending you reports with this data. Go back to them to review them. Look a the web traffic you received and how people get to your law firm’s website.
You may find that some web traffic comes from search engine results pages, other traffic from social media, and other traffic from referral sources and online reviews. Knowing how the people who came to your law firm’s website got there is key to effectively taking your message to market.
We typically recommend a tiered approach to getting your message out in the marketplace in this phase. Take a look at our previous video on building a marketing strategy for ideas on how to build awareness for your services, nurture your audience, and ultimately convert your audience from casual audience members to paying clients.
Build a Law Firm Marketing Plan and Stick to It
The final step of growing your law firm using a strong (but easy to develop) marketing strategy is to actually build a plan and stick to it.
Let’s really be honest with ourselves as we think back on some of our best efforts in building and implementing a law firm marketing strategy. We have seen many law firms and lawyers struggle the most with consistency.
What Happens When You Stop Being Consistent in Your Marketing?
Many law firms say they want to post content for their social media marketing three times a week, and they plan to email their contact list at least once per month, but client work gets in the way and marketing strategies fall to the wayside.
We’re not saying we don’t understand how this happens. We do. HOWEVER. Don’t do that.
Why? There’s nothing more difficult to do than re-gain the trust of your followers when you’ve ignored them for months.
Your prospective clients want to know you’re consistent and reliable, and a sure-fire way to make them feel otherwise is to capture their attention and leave them hanging.
If you’re hit or miss on communications, they will come to expect your legal services operate that way, too. So, show them that you’re disciplined and you can nail your marketing plan, even if it means making time when time is on short supply.
Want Your Own Law Firm Marketing Plan?
Your marketing plan doesn’t need to be some 100-page slide deck that overwhelms and breeds inconsistency. It can be as simple as a few jotted notes on a sheet of paper.
If you are interested in a more robust and structured marketing strategy, we created a handy downloadable worksheet that is perfect for the busy lawyer who knows they need to be speaking directly to their audience. You can download it at the top of this page.
Let us know your thoughts on our marketing worksheet or if you’d like help supplementing your law firm’s marketing department efforts. We’re here to help you perfect your digital presence!
