How to cut your legal marketing budget to Zero

For legal practice, marketing, business development or sales is a modern invention – the labels at least.

We all know that firms and select partners were previously doing a lot of things mentioned in my previous posts and upon which many books have been written. First among these is having regular and frequent contact with their clients. And after that was the ability to deal with each client as a human being and not just as another ‘billable matter” or a means to get the chargeable time up (I always thought that expressing things in this way was incredibly dehumanising).

But the fact is that any product or service that is remarkable will need next to no marketing: the bush fire of word of mouth will drive sales.

Even the social media platforms that have received such wide acclaim and are free will still require feeding with memorable content and staffing to drive the next stage of the influencing process. Right now there are a lot of people who think that social media is the saviour of the profession as if ‘new’ media means better than ‘old’ marketing. Think again.

Marketing is a tax on law firms that could be eradicated if only firms started to insanely focus on developing and enhancing the experience with their clients. They need to start imaging a world with bigger and more sophisticated brands and clients whose loyalty and custom will be cherished and not taken for granted.

Firms need to stop under delivering on their service and over charging their clients. They need to understand what value looks like and to properly understand their clients’ needs. Of course no one client is the same and what works for a FTSE 100 company/GC may be different to acting for a private client but if you take the time to speak to your client(s) you will quickly understand what they want. Too much of what law firms do is created in a vacuum. It is underpinned by an ego mentality: lawyers know best.

It is easy to deride the idea of WOW service but in reading various case studies about businesses that epitomise this concept (Zappos nearly always coming out on top), I have yet to read anything about a law firm. Why is that? Do you really need to ask? But in all seriousness it must be one of two reasons:

1. They don’t care enough to make it happen; or
2. They are delusional: they think that the service is WOW when in reality it is at best mediocre.

If every person within the practice was focused on being the most of something (a lawyer), providing a service that was the best in the world then given the plethora of law firms it wouldn’t be long before clients started talking about you. After all clients want to feel that they are getting the best and if every time they mentioned legal services your name came up then at the very least new clients would be compelled to check you out.

Next time you sit down to discuss marketing ask yourself what you would do if you were in start up mode and had no money. At the very least you might decide to embark on a programme where you aimed to superplease each and every client, embarked on a proactive programme for generating word of mouth referrals and reached out to your clients for feedback.

How to engage your market and connect with clients

Social media has not (yet) been widely embraced by law firms. Yet, worse still, firms don’t understand the need for a ‘WOW’ website, and are more concerned with covering all the bases (i.e. demonstrating their specialism or sector expertise) than developing a platform that is useful, brilliant on the eye or remarkable. The apps market, which is set to reach $25 billion by 2015, appears currently to have been ignored for want, presumably, of a lack of ideas of where they might fit into the practice.

But a lot of this secondary to the glaring issue of content. And not just any content but content that has the power to build a following, inspire clients or set out on a voyage of discovery that is genuinely remarkable. The fact is that law firms don’t think in this way and are much more interested in making sure they fill the website with something no matter how dull.

Yes, I know it is an issue that has been thrashed to death, but I feel I need to make another plea to firms to address the issue of content before they start hitting the social media trail, as they inevitably will (or are). Otherwise you will see, as is the case now, Twitter being used to broadcast the same (dull) material. Let’s face it when you have been able to rely on the ‘Build it and They Will Come’ philosophy, the idea of having to produce content that people will read, find useful and ultimately wish to share is a challenge.

Take the typical website: It is a mixture of firm news (promotions, office location issues or CSR projects), commentary on the news of the day (usually with an economic flavour) or a legal alert that has been produced which needs to be flashed up on the front page. How much of this is remarkable?

As I have said before, the best place to start in understanding what clients want is to ask them. Who knows in simply trying to align your service offering with the client they might just think, for once, that you are doing what a lawyer should do – be proactive and not rely on problems arising and then trying to resolve them.

Please don’t relay upon the client care paraphernalia where you might ask your client to indicate which of your newsletters etc. they want them to receive. Most will not return the forms and it will be left to the fee earner to select what they think is most apposite to cover their client’s industry type. Lawyers being lawyers will mean that they will think more is better.

Just imagine if you asked your client what they wanted. The first question might be:

Q. Would you find it useful to receive information about the firm?

A. No.

Right that kills that one off.

Next.

Q. Would you like to receive information about issues affecting your sector?

A. It depends on what sort of information you are talking about.

Q. Would you like to receive information that was focused on … [you fill in the blank].

A. Yes, absolutely.

Now this requires a great deal more time and trouble than relying on a box being ticked or, as sometimes happens, just relying on a historical database.

In addition to the exercise of nailing what the client Likes, you also need to consider the platform that will enable the information to have the greatest reach (assuming the client or referer is willing to syndicate the information to his followers or contacts). Are you going to email it? If so, one tip is to make sure that you include a share button.

Will you post it? Whilst this is still a perfectly acceptable way of doing things, you need to consider how the ideas contained in the article etc can be passed on.

What about a video? Are you going to embed this in an email or send a URL?

What about using a blog? Perhaps this could be captured in your questionnaire.

What about the use of RSS or one of the increasing number or Readers?

What about producing content that previously you might have charged for. Yes I mean giving something away for FREE! 

Whenever this model is mentioned the immediate knee-jerk reaction is to dismiss the idea on the basis that lawyers don’t give anything away for free. But that misses the point. When you go to a networking event and are asked a question which you chose to answer, you are giving something away for free.

When a prospective client calls to get a provisional idea about something and you discuss some of the options but the instruction goes nowhere, you are giving your time away for free.

In old money we would call this ”A sprat to catch a mackerel”. Nowadays it tends to be labelled the freemium model; but the thing is if you are hopeful of creating a loyal following of clients or attracting new clients then the market will expect something for nothing but more than that something that has genuine depth and is useful. Here is an example of what PWC produce. Whilst arguably it is no different to a newsletter, nevertheless the way it is set up makes it feel that it has some value and also enables them to capture your contact details which is usually one of the objectives of the exercise. 

Firms need to start sweating the existing website and using it much more than is currently the case before launching into a social media paradigm. Think about the use of RSS, share buttons, tagging and constantly updating the content, otherwise social media could cause more issues that it solves, particularly as firms run out of things that they can or want to say. It also means that firms will have to think about governance, training, feeding blogs and the time commitment. Is this the best use of your time?

As an advocate for radical change there is no point embracing ‘New’ for the sake of it. Orchestrate your efforts to make the most of the existing assets and only once you feel you have taken things as far as you can should you start to innovate around social media or whatever you feel the practice needs.