4 Reasons Why Most Law Firm Marketing Fails
Lawyers often prefer to practice law rather than market their services. They know they should be doing activities to attract new business, but those tasks usually are pushed off until they have more free time. What happens is they find their practice struggling to attract new clients. Here are 4 reasons why most law firm marketing fails.
1) Too many cooks – Many law firms try to make marketing decisions by committee. When this happens, their marketing campaigns often suffer from too many cooks in the kitchen. Marketing requires strategic focus, so the more decision-makers involved, the more watered down and ineffective the marketing message. Decide in advance who will be responsible for your firm’s marketing decisions and allow that person to do their job.
2) Taking marketing shortcuts – Lawyers often don’t understand all the intricacies of marketing, so they try to cut costs by trimming the “bells and whistles.” However, many of those bells and whistles are fundamental to a successful marketing campaign. For instance, many lawyers think creating a marketing message, differentiating their services, or doing competitive research is a bunch of fluff. Others don’t want to spend time on keyword research with online marketing. Yet these are essential components that make marketing work. If you eliminate them, you won’t get the results you want. It’s like deciding to skip the discovery phase of a court case and go right to the jury trial. If you don’t have the strategy in place and a compelling story to tell, you won’t win.
3) Marketing when you “have time” – Whenever lawyers get busy, they often stop their marketing efforts to focus on client work. As a result, all their inquiries come to a halt and no new business comes their way. When their client work ends, they realize they don’t have any new work in the pipeline so they quickly restart their marketing campaigns in hopes of attracting new business quickly. Often, this doesn’t work. Marketing your legal services should be part of your daily activities if you want to grow your firm.
4) Writing a complicated marketing plan – You don’t need a 50-page marketing plan for your law firm. What you do need is a simple list of tasks that each of the lawyers in your firm understand and take action towards. The most effective marketing tactics are the ones you will spend time doing and getting right.
If you want to create a successful law firm marketing campaign, you have to be willing to commit the time, money and resources to running it over the long-term. Think of marketing like exercise. If you only go to the gym once a month, you won’t be nearly as physically fit as if you went three times a week. Go once a month and you probably won’t see results. Go three times a week and the results will start to show in a few weeks.