Mental Demands of Legal Marketing: Do you have the fortitude?
A person doesn’t start or take control of a law firm without fortitude. The business is demanding, and competition is high. To succeed in personal injury law, fortitude is a must-have. But you can’t just devote this mental acuity to your cases and operations; you must also invest it in your marketing. The mental demands of marketing can be just as important as the mechanical. If you’re going to start marketing your law firm, you must have a vision, develop a position and strategy, and prioritize, prioritize, prioritize.
Vision
The first step in developing a marketing plan is defining your vision. What do you want your marketing to accomplish? Naturally, you want more calls—but are you just trying to shore up business with a few new cases? Or is this an effort to significantly grow your business? One question you could ask yourself is where you want to be in five years. Are you simply looking for steady business for a small staff? Or are you aiming to be the next industry giant? Your vision will determine your strategy, investment level, and the amount of effort and focus you’ll have to dedicate to marketing.
Position & Strategy
Positioning is key. Another mental aspect of marketing is developing, observing, and evaluating your positioning. Does your target market know your brand? Your brand needs to be distinct, and it needs to be alive and well within your firm. As we’ve emphasized in previous blogs and articles, there is a direct correlation between case volume and the branding/awareness of a firm—name recognition and knowledge of your brand provides the shortest bridge between someone needing a law firm and calling your firm.
Ask yourself how you stack up against your competition. How is your competitor’s branding distinctive? The key element in distinguishing you from others, a distinctive brand is a core piece of the greater marketing puzzle.
Law firm marketing strategy (not to be confused with buying strategy) and position go hand in hand. What’s the purpose or reason to bring your firm to the consideration of your audience—what value do you bring clients? Like your branding, legal marketing strategy distinguishes you from competitors, and it does so by highlighting what you do that is different from what others do. It gives you a unique space to own in the marketplace. If you get the strategy right, everything else falls into place.
Mindset
Here’s where your mental fortitude really comes into play. Are you approaching marketing with the right mindset? We often see attorneys put their toes in the water of advertising only to retreat after the first two months. Advertising isn’t an overnight game—it takes stamina and sustainability. The right advertising can grow your firm, but you must commit to it and make it a priority. Be honest—do you have the determination to stick it out?
Know where marketing and advertising rank on your priority list before diving into a campaign. If marketing ranks low on your priority list, your initiative is doomed before it gets off the ground. And for that reason, a good marketing company will simply walk away. Your marketing is a living machine, a breathing entity that requires designing, building, managing, analyzing, and optimizing. It is a relationship that you learn from, and every observation drives the next phase.
What does this require of you? Weekly attention at the minimum and daily attention in some cases. Marketing demands your attention as a business owner just like human resources, finance, and operations. Do you have the fortitude?
Mechanical Demands of Legal Marketing – What items and actions are required?
Let’s look at the tangibles now—what are the mechanical demands of marketing and how will you use them to ensure marketing success? These pieces, in combination with a strong mindset, will help you achieve your goals.
Creative
Driven by your positioning and strategy, creative is how your firm comes to life in the minds of your prospective clients. Have you evaluated your existing creative lately? It must align with your position and stand out when compared to others. Is your creative worn out and stale? Or do you have a library large enough to stay fresh in the minds of your target audience? Your library size should correspond with your marketing efforts—if you’re doing large-scale advertising, your library should be significant.
Your production cycle, meanwhile, should correspond with your library size. Can you commit to a production cycle of at least twice a year? This would be the minimum, depending on what tactics and media channels you employ. Aggressive marketing law firms update their creative through quarterly—or even more frequent—production cycles.
Media
When thinking about your media, know this—you should never chase the competition. What’s right for another firm is often wrong for you. The knee-jerk reaction to wrap a bus because your competitor wrapped a bus will not do you any favors. Your media buys should stem purely from your law firm’s position and strategy, not someone else’s. If you know your position—what you want to say and how—you know what you stand for, and more importantly, you know who that matters to. When your media buys are guided by that information, your plan has practically written itself. You’ll know which channels to start with and which channels to bring in later.
While mechanical, media also requires the mental discipline to be picky. Do not run in all media channels—when firms do, they typically spread their efforts too thin. Stay focused, start small, and execute your first channel(s) exceptionally well before incorporating more.
Tracking
This mechanical piece of marketing is extremely important and is unfortunately an area many firms don’t have the fortitude to prioritize. You must make room for tracking and analytics. As advertisers, we spend an enormous amount of time observing the performance and outcomes of marketing. By comparing this data to the predictions made prior to launch, we get invaluable information. These observations and insights drive how we modify and optimize the approach. Sometimes it instructs us to go deeper into a media channel. Other times it influences us to run a specific ad concept for greater ROI. Analytics show the spikes and dips in engagement and enable us to pivot—to change creative, shift budgets, and make recommendations on how to move to the next phase.
About Roux Advertising
Eric Morgan is the President of Roux Advertising, a full-service agency that specializes in increasing law firm case volume through distinctive marketing campaigns. Roux employs a strategy-first approach to position law firms uniquely in the marketplace, crafting ad messaging, media buying, and analytics to generate brand awareness and drive qualified cases.
