Solos and small firms face a more difficult task in marketing their firms and I’m not talking about money. It’s time. You don’t have the people to delegate the marketing tasks to, so you shoulder the burden yourself and do your best to get up to speed on what is working today for legal marketing.
But it’s usually too much — too much of your time trying to figure out the best legal marketing strategies for your firm and too much information to sort through. So to help you sort through the fire hose of information out there, here are my five marketing must-haves for solos and small firms:
Consistency
Today, you must reach prospects a minimum of nine times before they recognize you and will consider your services. This means you need to pick a few strategies and then be consistent in your legal marketing efforts over time. You should be setting aside a block of time for marketing every day, whether that is engaging on social media, writing and posting a blog, or meeting a referral source for lunch. Consistency in marketing your practice will help you avoid the ups and downs of client acquisition and revenue generation that can plague many solos and small firms.
Tracking
Whether it’s time or money, marketing has a cost to your firm. This is why it is critical that you know as soon as possible what works and what doesn’t. This knowledge comes from tracking your legal marketing efforts. Free tools like Google Analytics provides important insights about visitors to your website or blog — where they come from, where they spend their time, what pieces of information are important to them, etc.
Branding
When I talk about branding, I’m not talking about a tagline or a logo. I am talking about how you want prospects and clients to know and feel about you as a lawyer. You must define your niche as narrowly as possible and decide how you are different (your “unique competitive advantage”), then promote content that reinforces your niche and point of differentiation consistently. This not only helps you attract the right clients, but it also helps your referral sources understand who would make a good referral for you.
Reviews
Consumer reviews are here to stay and the good ones are marketing gold for lawyers. People today depend on reviews to make their buying decisions, and I’m not just talking about products. They trust them as much as they do word-of-mouth referrals. They are also becoming increasingly important to search engines like Google. You need to establish a process for getting reviews and continue to gather them since people expect reviews to be current.
Mobile
More online searches today are conducted on mobile devices, so all your online properties — your website, your blog, your e-newsletter, your landing pages — must be optimized for mobile. Google also looks for mobile-friendly sites, and you will be penalized with a lower ranking if your sites are not mobile-friendly.
The best thing you can do as a solo or small firm owner to up your marketing game is to attend a Rainmaker Retreat, our intensive two-day legal marketing seminar. You’ll walk away knowing the latest proven strategies for legal marketing today as well as a personalized plan for your law firm to implement when you get home.
We have already scheduled several sessions for 2020, which you can find by clicking on Upcoming Retreats in the navigation bar above.
