Strategy. The word that sends a shudder down your spine as a legal SME, right? Because let’s face it, we’re all too familiar with high-level marketing strategy decks that you can’t do anything with. Too many diagrams and frameworks! Too few actionable plans to bring new clients into the law firm. I want to show you that creating a robust law firm marketing strategy *can* be simple. Ultimately, it all comes down to saying the RIGHT things, to the RIGHT people, in the RIGHT places. Follow my step-by-step guide to creating a killer marketing strategy that lets your brave, bold and ambitious law firm fly!
Your law firm marketing strategy starts and ends with your customers
You’ve probably heard of a marketing persona but do you really know what it is, how to create one and why it’s important? There’s no reason why you should! But allow me to enlighten you…
Marketing personas are the foundations of your marketing house. A persona is a detailed description of your customer. When you’re able to talk directly to one person who you can visualise clearly, it’s far easier to connect with them on a deeper level. And when you have empathy for them, you can deliver marketing that is relevant and resonant.
But don’t just focus on those ideal customers you’d LOVE to serve. Make sure your persona is backed by data. Legal marketing is most powerful when we do more of what works, so build effective customer personas with these three steps:
- Speak to existing and potential customers to find out their business aspirations, challenges and frustrations via 1:1 calls for qualitative insights and using surveys for some quantitative data. With clients, you can also dig into why your partnership works.
- Speak regularly to your customer-facing teams, to find out what questions they’re often asked.
- Glean demographic insights from your Google Analytics, Linkedin Company Page and behavioural insights from your social media analytics.
Of course, there’s no harm in setting your sights on the more aspirational customers you are wanting to target! Ask questions that feel like the bleedin’ obvious. I promise you’ll understand them better:
- What kind of marketing do they like to receive?
- How do they like to consume content?
- What topics are of interest to them?
- Who do they think is marketing well?
- What do they love and what do they hate?
Committing to doing this work at the start gives your law firm’s marketing strategy every possible chance of being relevant, resonant and effective. You’ll have a clear idea of who to target with what content and messaging … and on which channels.
Good marketing starts and ends with customers. To avoid becoming complacent and making assumptions about their needs, take an ‘outside looking in’ approach. This ensures you create value instead of noise. Customer research is never really complete – you should be having regular customer conversations as market needs are always evolving.
Keep your enemies close
Only joking. They’re not really your enemies. But you do need to understand everything about your competitors so you can have that competitive edge. In an increasingly noisy market, positioning yourself to stand out means truly understanding your competitive space and who else sits within it.
With some in-depth research, you’ll get answers to these all-important questions:
- Who are your competitors?
- What do they say about themselves?
- Who are their customers?
- What are their services and pricing?
- What are their marketing tactics?
You can also use our good friends Google and social media to help you identify where the gaps are and what your competitive advantage and opportunity is.
Be a SWOT
I know, I know. I said no frameworks or diagrams! But indulge me with just one exception. Who doesn’t love a SWOT analysis? If you want to create a super-targeted marketing strategy for your law firm that positions you to stand out from the crowd, you’ll need to analyse your strengths, internal weaknesses, opportunities and external threats.
This lets you build on the areas where you’re already seeing results and improve on or pivot from the marketing tactics not yielding results.
With your competitor analysis done and dusted, you should now be able to identify your threats from competitors and the wider industry and opportunities – so you can work out where the gaps are.
Positioning & Messaging
What you say matters and how often you say it is the key to standing out, attracting, nurturing and converting prospects and followers into clients. Doing your customer research, competitor and SWOT analysis is one thing. You now need to take those learnings and use them to inform how you position yourself in the market. Then it’s your messaging that does the job of communicating:
- What you want to be known for
- How you will stand out
- What makes you different
Use your research to decide and document how you’ll communicate. Be clear on what language you’ll use and avoid. Agree on a tone of voice that works for you. Set out some key impactful statements that you’ll use throughout your marketing, headline campaigns and content assets. It’s clarity and repetition that makes your messaging stick in the minds of your ideal customers. Plan ahead by setting out your hero campaigns versus your evergreen content, then list out all the marketing assets you intend to create, from blogs to videos.
Choose your channels wisely
So you now know everything there is to know about your customers. And you know what you’re going to say and how. But where are you going to communicate your message and publish your content? Remember – you don’t have to be everything to everyone and you definitely don’t have to be everywhere.
Go back to your customer research and select up to three3 marketing channels, based on where they spend their time. When you split your efforts between your owned channels – like website, email marketing and SEO and your rented channels like social media – you avoid putting all your eggs in one basket.
If you’re B2B – invest well in high quality SEO-optimised website and blog content, which you can then repurpose across Linkedin (personal and brand pages) and email marketing. If you’re B2C, you may choose to invest more heavily in social media content and channels – but your market research should guide you here.
Test your messaging and your content on these channels, analyse the results, then go from there. It can be tempting for small law firms and legal businesses to launch straight into the tactical activity without doing the steps I’ve laid out above. It can be easy to fall into the trap of trying everything and making lots of noise in the hope that something will stick. But that ‘success’ won’t be sustainable. You’ll burn through money and energy. Both you and your audience will get a severe case of marketing overwhelm.
Combine your legal marketing strategy with a plan
Without a plan and roadmap for goals, KPIs and milestones – a strategy runs the risk of gathering dust without delivering results!
Your roadmap should start with your benchmarked data and what you need to improve, and end at your vision of success in 3 years time. In order to get from the start to the finish, we need to add prioritised actions to take, goals to measure success in both the short and long term.
But let’s be extra adventurous and take it one step further. Let’s turn that roadmap into a tactical checklist. This is where the executional magic happens. This marketing action plan should include, line-by-line, each marketing activity – with an associated objective and distribution channel. And it doesn’t need to involve complicated tech. An excel spreadsheet can work just fine or using a collaboration tool like ClickUp, Asana or Monday.com – whatever works best for the business.
Creating a law firm marketing strategy CAN be simple
So as this step-by-step comes to a close, let’s recap. Speak to and learn from your customers but keep it simple. Create a set of personas who you know and love so much that you want to market to them in a way that feels easy and reciprocal. Know your category and your competitive space. How do you fit within it? Be clear on how you talk about your law firm. Pick three channels max and nail them before you even contemplate moving onto others! The goals you set in your roadmap will tell you whether you’re nailing them. And remember – you should aim to deliver your marketing plan for at least six months in order to build up traction and get the necessary data to analyse what’s working and what isn’t.
As you eagerly embark upon creating your marketing strategy, inspired by this blog – I encourage you to remember the importance of consistency and clarity. Stay consistent and clear with the brand, visual identity and set of key messages that you deliver across your website, your blog, your chosen social media. This will keep you memorable in the eyes of your future customers. Lastly, stay consistent with those chosen marketing tactics without getting distracted by new ideas for long-term results.
If you’ve got all the enthusiasm and ideas but less of the confidence to stay on track, my Marketing Momentum sessions might be just the dose of accountability you need.