By Ellen Toplin
So, you have big news. One of your partners has been elected president of the local bar. Perhaps your firm is about to merge with another midsize firm. Maybe one of your attorneys won a groundbreaking, substantial case. Or your firm is sponsoring a charitable event. You are right - any one of these activities could be leveraged, both as a way to grab the media spotlight and as a means to positively position you in the minds of clients and referral sources.
While there is certainly value in these goals, it is critical that you step back and look at your firm’s bigger marketing picture before moving ahead. Before you spend money, expend effort and waste valuable time to promote news that could wind up receiving little attention, remember this: it is critical to separate knee-jerk, ego-based decisions from business-based ones. Deciding how you promote what should fit into an overall strategic marketing plan that is geared towards meeting your firm’s bottom line business objectives.
The key for small to midsize firms is to not only capture opportunities but to create ongoing, integrated, groupings of opportunities that bring lasting value to the firm’s table.
Here are several important questions that law firms should consider:
- How can your firm strategically create proactive public relations and marketing plans?
- How do you know if opportunities really have true PR potential, as opposed to being fooled into thinking that every opportunity deserves a major splash?
- How can a single opportunity be leveraged into multiple promotional opportunities? My rule of thumb is that every opportunity should have at least three planned pieces of follow-up.
Collective Marketing
Historically, many law firms are not structured in a way that promotes operating as a marketing collective. Many firms are run as an alliance of professionals who happen to practice under the same roof. Some firms even have created management and financial/bonus structures that create a disincentive to firm wide marketing -- by rewarding individual attorneys on the business they bill or personally service rather than accounting for the collective value they bring to the firm. Recognizing that an “eat what you kill” mentality gets in the way of collective marketing, some firms have moved beyond such short sightedness.
Many forward-looking firms have also realized that simply putting an individual attorney’s or firm’s name out there randomly doesn’t bring lasting marketing value. These firms instead concentrate on penetrating a specific market and then consistently position attorneys from different practice groups within their firm in that market. Concurrently, they target a group of (perhaps 10) potential clients in that market and concentrate their personal networking time on establishing direct contacts/links to key decision makers and referral sources connected to those targets. The idea is to establish a position in a market and cultivate a collective reputation as “a player” in that particular market niche.
Part of any firm’s success in such niche marketing does, however, depend on its ability to harness its attorneys’ talent and time. The key is to motivate and encourage a group of lawyers to collectively market. Since every lawyer’s marketing time is limited, getting 10 lawyers to each work towards the same marketing goal over the course of a year goes farther than having 10 attorneys pursuing 10 independent activities during the same period.
Selecting Targets
Get the firm’s key decision makers together. Find out where you get business, and critically analyze those sources. Look at all referral sources, examine them on a month to month basis. What kinds of cases are coming in? Then look at open cases. How do they cluster? Don’t just consider the types of cases, but what particular problem from a client’s perspective are you addressing? Is there an industry and market where your client needs seem to show up most?
Look at competitive issues. What are other firms doing? What do their images say? What are your true differences? Look at your skill sets, your connections, results history, the way cases are handled. Think about why a company hires and more importantly, keeps a law firm. How can you anticipate the next set of problems that a client may not know they have yet? The truth is, people and companies hire lawyers, not only based on reputation. They also choose a lawyer or firm that really understands their particular need or problem.
Above all, remember that marketing is not about you or your needs, it’s about your clients and their needs. Knowing who the real decision makers and influencers are is the first step, but knowing what they need and want is the next.
The backbone of any PR campaign is a strategic marketing assessment – what geographic niches are you targeting, what current problems will you address, what future problems can you anticipate or head off?
Getting on the Short List
No marketing or promotional campaign can ever replace the fact that people select their professional advisors based on relationships. Face to face and careful cultivating of relationships and referral sources remains critical. But, positioning your firm as an organization of key individuals who are known for their knowledge, skills and intense connection with a particular industry or business can pave the way for those connections. If you have done strategic public relations positioning, people will have heard of you. They will recognize your name – and you are more likely to already be on their short list. Remember, it takes time and energy to become recognized as an authority, but if you make the proper commitment, it will pay off.
Another way to reach the decision makers is to develop ways to address their needs, through speaking engagements, breakfast seminars and authored articles in publications that they read and are influenced by. Participating in and identifying charitable boards on which your targeted clients sit is another good idea. What charities are your potential clients passionate about? It’s not only about writing a check, but being involved in an activity that elevates your esteem in your key market. Joining a board that everybody else joins isn’t enough. You need to make your presence and power there known while spending your limited free time judiciously but strategically.
The key is to maximize your return. Don’t do a frenzy of things in a vacuum. Everything you do should be all for one, one for all. Be focused on a single goal, and really target the clients on your hit list.
Follow Up
Marketing is never an isolated event. So, after you decide on a course of action, whether it is a seminar or a charitable event, or an authored article, what’s next? Once you get off the dais, most of the crowd will forget all about you – unless you follow up. You may meet a key contact at a board meeting, but so what? If you don’t reinforce that impression and bring value to that individual or a company, your initial efforts are wasted.
Let’s look at the seminar example. Be sure there is a sign in list, so you keep in touch with the attendees, after the meeting. But give your audience a reason to want to expect your follow up. Leave your audience wanting more information, maybe about an article you’ve written or an update on pending legislation -- some reason for you to keep in contact. At a charitable board meeting, you may raise an issue like women’s initiatives in the community, or ideas for creating a mentoring program, and that gives you a reason to connect again.
Perhaps you’ve published an article on a key issue. Why not send a copy to a reporter covering this beat, along with your bio and offer yourself as a source? Post the article on your website, email it to key contact to whom it applies. Leverage every opportunity to truly maximize your return.
The Bottom Line
Remember, one of the keys to successful PR and marketing is to plan strategically and package a series of activities that surround a market. By consistently positioning your firm’s connection to a market and its collective understanding of that market’s unique needs, while making direct connections to decision makers in that market, you increase the returns on your PR investment. And that brings returns to everyone’s bottom line.