Firm marketing (Part Two): Teaching your team how to contribute to your marketing

In my previous blog post, I discussed how you can use marketing for your firm’s growth, the most popular methods of marketing for firms and finally, the basic steps needed to put that plan into action.

Now it’s time to flesh out that plan a little more. Increasing your firm’s profile in the marketplace rarely comes from thin air, so the first step is to establish a team.  You will need to decide who is the marketing authority (either an in house expert or someone like me 😉 ), plan out what resources you need, how the resources and content will be approved and how it will be distributed.

There’s an overarching concept you need to consider, though. We’ve covered marketing, the vehicles for marketing and the marketing plan, but what do you need to REALLY consider what makes up your marketing?

Part Two of this blog series will cover making a plan for your marketing. Not only making the plan actionable, but also what your marketing should be focused on in order to create it in the first place!

Marketing based on clients

There’s no ’one size fits all‘ marketing plan. Depending on your industry, you will need to figure out a marketing strategy that works for your firm. For instance, a law firm may not employ the same marketing strategy, or even the same marketing platforms, as another firm.  It all depends on who your clients are and where you can find them (online and geographically).

In order to establish your own firm marketing strategy, consider this idea: market based on the clients you already have, not the clients you don’t have.

Here’s an exercise you can use to figure this out. Ask your marketing team members to consider the firm’s top three clients – it may even make more sense to do this per partner and / or service offering. Compile information on these clients and ask several questions about each of them:

• How did they hear about your firm initially?
• What is it that prompted them to trial your services?
• Why do they keep coming back?
• What pain points do they still currently have?
• What do they say they need from us?
• How do we currently deliver services to them? Can this be streamlined?
• What benefits do we receive from their continued service?
• What networking events are they interested in?
• Where do they go for information?
• What digital platforms do they frequent?

The logic followed is that these clients have already committed themselves to your services. The best way,therefore, to grow your client list is to try and replicate the scenario and attract more ‘like’ clients. By assessing what they still need from your firm as a business, you discover how you can further draw in new clients.

Creating the content

You’ve asked the right questions about the direction of your marketing, but now we need to talk about actually planning for content creation itself.

Consider that not every potential client is a truly valuable client. For instance, a law firm that takes on a client for one specific case will benefit from this client for a short amount of time, but the likelihood of seeing this client return is dependent on their compliance needs, satisfaction with their current provider, the trust you have built in your relationship and many other factorsboth inside and  outside of your control.

The content you create will be focused on the types of clients you’re looking to take in and, ultimately, your dream client. Ask yourself: what is the definition of a dream client for our firm? Answer that question and market to them too.

Brain storm a list of the topics surrounding your current and dream client considerations you have just noted.  Once you have this list, you will need to identify the members of your team (or more broadly those from across your firm), who are able to contribute to develop the content that responds to these needs.  

In brief:

1. Create a content calendar based on your brainstorming topics
2. Identify the person to provide the details around this content and examples (mini case studies) of situations and clients that relate to it
3. Provide them the due date
4. Take this content and allocate a member of your marketing team to recreate the content for your website, as a blog, article, tweet, post, brochure, press release, newsletter – whatever medium is appropriate to reach your clients and dream clients….leverage your content  to profile your expertise more broadly
5. Track and measure engagement in your content so that you can both improve the content and delivery, as well as revisit it (as you know that’s what your market is interested in).

In the next part of this blog series, I’ll discuss how you go about actually writing this content and tips for making content actionable.

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