Legal marketing is a broad term that refers to advertising and other practices, such as customer relations, public relations, networking, participation in professional organizations, etc. Marketing is about building relationships by providing value to potential customers. The only difference with legal marketing is that clients are the clients of your law firm. Unless you went to business school before studying law, chances are you don't consider yourself a marketing professional.
However, it is likely that you are already conducting marketing activities at your law firm. This is because anything that raises awareness about your business is marketing. Legal marketing is any advertising method used by a law firm to interest a wider client base. This includes using SEO on your website, starting email campaigns and creating social media profiles.
Legal marketing generally costs a law firm about 1.9% of its total revenue each year. Keeping goals in mind helps you create a more targeted legal marketing plan so you can attract the right customer for your practice and stay informed of your marketing analytics, KPIs, and ROI to see if it fits your target budget and timelines. Email marketing for lawyers, like any other marketing effort, requires consistency and a regular review of your strategy. The most valuable legal marketers are those who come up with substantive ideas for targeting new customers, entering new markets, or approaching existing customers in innovative ways.
You can hire an agency, freelancer, or other third-party vendors to handle certain marketing pieces and in-house professionals to take care of the rest. Increasingly, it will be up to legal salespeople to push for proof point biographies to show that the lawyer can achieve what the client needs and make them stand out from the strong competition for new business. We have the legal and marketing knowledge to collaborate with you and your in-house marketing team to deliver a unified message across all channels. Your marketing toolkit should include at least your brand and your brand guidelines, customer characters, an idea of what your marketing funnel will look like, and a solid website.
While this may be valuable for litigation matters or deal documents where an attorney must cover all possibilities, it is not valuable for marketing content. Many legal professionals take alternative career paths and could pursue legal marketing after being presented as lawyers. Just as you wouldn't expect a tax lawyer to defend a criminal case, you shouldn't expect a single member of the marketing team to be able to approach something outside of their primary focus with the same precision and insight as someone with that specialty. Marketing is based on a number of fundamental disciplines (we'll discuss them later), and your marketing team needs to know how to do it all.
However, these marketers may not have the subject matter expertise when it comes specifically to law firm marketing. For example, if a company focuses on marketing its industry expertise (such as healthcare, real estate, or consumer products), it should build its marketing team with BD managers who are well-versed in those industries and who can better support that industry-focused strategy. While texting has its limits, marketers will figure out how to break those boundaries to position a firm or lawyer in front of a specific target audience. Content marketing is one of the best ways for legal marketers to create value for potential customers.
Before you can start developing marketing plans for your law firm, you'll need to create a legal marketing toolkit. .
