Firm marketing (Part One): Marketing methods and how to begin utilising them
Will clients come to your firm naturally, based on need and your own luck? Sure. However, marketing exists for a reason. It’s how you show those same clients you’re the best choice for them, and make yourself known to potential clients who wouldn’t know you existed otherwise.
Let’s say a client needs a lawyer for legal trouble, and you happen to be a part of a law firm. Sure, this client may come to your firm for help, but there are five other law firms that has come up on their web search. What sets you apart?
Considering questions like this is fundamental in growing your firm’s client list. Growing this list doesn’t happen naturally — it requires effort, industry knowledge and great time management skills. Marketing might be simple at face value, but it involves a lot of moving parts that you should be aware of.
My newest blog series will discuss, in four parts, how you can enable your firm’s professionals to not only grow your client list, but also their own professional portfolio. Everybody wins!
Creating your firm’s marketing system
First, let’s talk about the ’what‘ of the scenario: your marketing system. You know the broad idea of marketing, but how do you actually give it a whirl?
You have a lot of options, so let’s look at a few of the most popular forms of marketing for professional firms:
- Social media: You know exactly what this is — utilising sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. for growing your client list.
- Content marketing: Creating content like blog posts, infographics, images, ebooks, etc. and using them to boost your SEO and promote your firm to clients.
- Thought leadership content: My area of expertise. This content is more professional and shares insight and experience, not just qualifications and showcases your professionalism and industry knowledge more than anything else.
- Newsletters: Newsletters not only inform your existing clients about your firm, they regularly remind them that you exist. Your newsletter showcases your expertise and how it has been used to support clients – just like them – growing your relationship. This makes them more likely to suggest your firm to others and come back to you themselves.
- Presentations: A slideshow of information can be an easily shared and digestible way to market your business to potential clients.
The next step
These are five common methods professional firms use in order to market their services, both to existing clients and new ones. The links can explain a little more, and there are thousands of resources for each online…but what’s the next step? How do you utilise these methods for your firm?
- Educate your team: Decide who your marketing team will be and discuss the basics. Who will lead your marketing? What digital and other channels will you use? Who will join the team to provide content? Who are you marketing to? This is very basic information, but the topic will be discussed more in the next blog in the series.
- Establish authority: No marketing for the firm should be published without approval. Who offers that approval? Is it a team, or one person?
- Sign off: When the marketing team creates content, what is the sign off process? The person who is the marketing authority; how do they handle the content stream?
- Distribution methods: Some marketing forms have an obvious distribution vehicle, like posting tweets on Twitter, posting blog posts to your website, etc. How can you leverage your firm owned media channels to gain the biggest profile and the highest engagement?
This brings us the next part of the discussion. You’ll have to read my next blog post!