Tag: marketing plan

Your Guide to Developing Your Personal Marketing Plan…and Why Every Lawyer Should Have One

In my humble opinion, every lawyer in private practice –- regardless of how many years practicing law — should have a Personal Marketing Plan. Here’s why:

You Will Seize Control of Your Career

Creating and implementing your Personal Marketing Plan enables you to seize control of your career. In time, it puts you in a position to attract and retain clients you enjoy, and matters you find challenging and interesting. You will also be less dependent on others to feed you. There are two kinds of lawyers in private practice: lawyers with clients, and lawyers who work for lawyers with clients. Which would you rather be?

You Will Make More Money

Rainmakers make more money — often a whole lot more money — than non-rainmakers in just about every law firm in the U.S. Chances are you’ve heard the terms “finders, minders and grinders.” Trust me; the action is with the finders.

You Will Have More Clout in the Firm

Lawyers who bring in business also have more power within their firms. Over time, they emerge as firm leaders, influencing important decisions about the firm, its policies and procedures, and its future direction.

How Much Time Should You Invest?

Of course, implementing your plan is the key to success….and it takes time. Non-billable time. I recommend that Partners invest 200 hours a year, and 100 hours a year for Associates. It’s critical you do a little bit every day. Fifteen minutes here. A half-hour there. Effective marketing and business development is not a “start-stop” process. It’s like an exercise regimen…results come with consistency over time.

What Types of Things Should You Do?

Partners should visit top clients at the clients’ places of business each year. (Refer to my previous Marketing Tip about Client Site Visits.) Associates should focus first on honing their legal skills and “credentialing” activities. For all attorneys, lunch once a week with a client, prospective client or referral source is a good habit. Joining and being actively involved in a well-chosen organization is another good thing to do. (Refer to my previous Marketing Tip about Individual Marketing Plans.) Article writing and speech giving are good activities, as well.

Make the Commitment to Yourself

Of course, developing and implementing your Personal Marketing Plan requires non-billable time. And, herein lies the dilemma for many lawyers. Non-billable “marketing time” is not rewarded — and sometimes not even measured — in many law firms. No matter, you should invest the time anyway. In his book True Professionalism, David Maister states that billable hours are for today’s income, but what you do with your non-billable time determines your future. I couldn’t agree more.

ARTICLE BY John Remsen, Jr of The Remsen Group

Copyright 2016 The Remsen Group

Serve Up a Strategic Marketing Approach

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Here it is more than halfway through the year and a lot of you who began 2014 committed to changing your marketing approach now realize “wow, nothing has changed.”

Below are ten steps to be more strategic in this year’s marketing planning:

1. Having good intentions in January is not the same as making marketing a priority.In other words, you jotted down some ideas, threw them in a drawer and went about your business. Marketing is often an afterthought.  If you do not make building and growing your practice a priority by scheduling it into your daily calendar and then “live and breathe” the concepts, how do you expect progress to be made, by you and other team members?

2. Develop cash flow budgets and projections are imperative so that you would have something to measure progress by. Businesses run with numbers. Law firms are no different. When creating a marketing plan, be as specific as possible. Set concrete goals as such as below:

  • Increase employment law cases by privately-held businesses cases by 15%
  • Acquire at least one new client each quarter with billings of at least $90k per quarter.
  • Increase revenue per existing top five clients by 20 percent

3. Creating metrics to measure the success or failure of your plans and activities against projections developed in number 2 is an ideal way to track your marketing initiatives by results achieved. Items such as response rates, average new billings per new clients, average billings from repeat work of existing clients…etc.  Do you have any written metrics and do you constantly monitor them? If not, this is a critical component for measuring success.

4. Assemble the right team.  Get the right people “on the bus and the wrong people” off the bus.  If your firm is full of worker bees, you will be challenged to produce marketing results.  However, if you support and empower those lawyers who are motivated to become a producer, a rainmaker, you are more likely to have a stronger marketing focus and better marketing results.

5. Retain professional training.While many lawyers “think” they know what to do, and they may, most do not know “how” to engage in high impact business development endeavors successfully. Effectively marketing and promoting a law practice ain’t what it used to be. Gone are the days when deals are just a handshake away and a matter of spending the afternoon on the golf course.

Seeking outside support to fully learn, from soup to nuts, the sales process, how to efficiently fill your pipeline AND persistently track your sales (i.e. new client engagements) are things that do not materialize from amorphous. Retain a professional trainer/coach and you will never go back.

6. Set a clear and powerful direction.  It is a powerful exercise to have regular meetings with your team to cultivate a marketing culture within a firm and to outline the marketing expectations.  Team meetings can serve multiple purposes of parlaying business opportunities, sharing knowledge, and achieving positive marketing results.

7. Turn up the focus dial. Most likely, if you do not focus like a laser on identifying targeted clients, markets and niche areas of practice, you will likely become discouraged and ease up on your marketing commitment. Thus, it is imperative to narrow down exact targets so you know who you are looking for. An example of this for a construction litigation practice may be commercial developers on the East Coast with revenues between $50-150 million a year. That description will narrow the companies you are looking for and are simple to find with basic online market research.

8. Assemble the marketing tools. Having the right tools is essential to ensuring you derive the most out of your marketing strategies. Tools are no longer limited to printed brochures, email and promotional items. Video, social media networking, SMS texting, webinars, podcasts, and creative interactive websites can also be highly effective, depending upon your marketing goals and objectives. The increase in marketing tools equates to greater options in your toolbox. It also means that selecting the right tools is more important than ever.

9.Invest in the right things.  Decadent offices, random acts of lunch, and token “shotgun” expenditures in the name of marketing do not attract new clients. Invest instead in strengthening relationships with key clients, communicating to existing clients and prospective clients how you are improving their businesses and/or personal lives.

10. Action, Action, Action. One of themost impactful ways you can be more strategic in your marketing planning is simply to execute on the plan. Marketing must be an integral part of your business, not a “set it and forget it” aspect of your business. In order to ensure that your marketing plan succeeds, you must be actively engaged in working that plan.

The means by which to instill a more strategic approach to your marketing are vast. Reiterating my mantra that marketing success comes with “consistent, persistent massive amounts of action over a prolonged period of time”, all the strategic marketing spokes (Internet marketing; communications program; reputation management, etc.) must be moving forward at the same concurrently. Anything less and the wheels just spin.

Article By:

Kimberly Alford Rice
Of:
KLA Marketing Associates