Marketing your law firm can encompass a number of areas. You might have a media campaign; direct mail, educational marketing, PR, Internet or you might focus your legal marketing on building a referral network. Whatever your marketing approach is, you can focus, reassure and enhance your positive results with an effective weekly planning meeting and appropriate delegation.
If you start out marketing your law firm without any sort of direction or plan, it is also likely you will be wasting money, right? In target shooting, it is “ready, aim, and then fire" – so too with marketing a law firm. Well, the trick is to continue this thinking throughout the marketing life of your firm. The need for focused marketing for your law firm does not run out like a warranty. The marketplace, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of your circumstances change over time and so should your legal marketing stance.
Although I always recommend outsourcing to an agency or hiring your own marketing team/person, I do understand that many budding firms, and businesses for that matter, do not have an abundant marketing budget, so here is a simplified start to marketing your new firm.
Host an Effective Weekly Planning Meeting
Each week, it is imperative that you take a moment to sit down with your team and get focused on your marketing strategy. This is your time to think about the practice and where it is going, to consider your mission and goals and what you can do to make them real, and to take a good look at the status of your law firm’s marketing.
The meeting itself should be scheduled on your calendar as at least a thirty-minute block of time. You should have no interruptions and be able to hold the meeting each Friday towards the end of the day or perhaps early Monday morning. Out of this meeting, you will come up with a fully prioritized “to do” list as well as a clearer picture of where the practice stands and what you need to do to meet the long term goals of the firm, in your personal life, and in attorney marketing.
Make/Prioritize Your Empowering List
Pull out your firm’s mission statement and 1, 5, 10-year goals and review them. While reviewing you will be able to identify key steps that need to be taken.
List the steps that will further each year’s goals. Visualizing the steps that need to be taken and breaking each one down will decrease the anxiety of completing your goals.
Delegate your list to your team. Larger firms that have marketing teams or outsource will be able to take over all delegated tasks at this point but for smaller firms, use your entire team to help with marketing. Prioritize tasks according to team roles. For example:
Important and must be done by a lawyer.
Less important and does not require a lawyer, could possibly be completed by paralegals.
Not very important and does not require a lawyer, could be completed by any staff member of possibly the office managers.
Rank the items on each list according to either urgency or day of completion:
Must be done within two days.
Must be done in three to five days.
Can wait until next week if necessary.
Now this this just an example of a super simple plan that can be easily followed but as the firm grows it would be wise to incorporate spreadsheets into your planning and move towards future planning in 3-6 month blocks while using the same concept.
Delegate Tasks
Delegate any tasks that you possibly can. If you can’t delegate it, ask yourself why? No staff? Not enough staff? No trained the staff? Staff not effective? Fix these issues so you can delegate. Create a form to use that you can give to each team member. Share the following expectations with your team during your planning sessions:
Today’s date
Due date for task
What is to be done
Why the task is important
How often to report to you on progress or status
Further instructions
The goal here is to stop doing as many tasks as possible, that take you away from your more demanding business or personal duties. You make your money doing things lawyers do (associate, partner and managing partner lawyer things) not other things. This will free up your time to do more tasks, and you can attend to important matters in growing your practice. If you have associates, now you can do less technical work and do more marketing strategy that is the lifeblood of any practice.
You should always keep your marketing goals in mind as you prioritize your list and delegate tasks. The success you achieve from marketing your law firm will grow as the skill and effectiveness of your managerial and entrepreneurial time and skills grow.
✨I'm the CEO of Simplified VA™ - Marketing Boutique to Attorneys, Healthcare Clinicians & Nonprofits offering brand strategy, website design, content creation, speaking & training. ✨Join my list for tips, invites, & engagement ->https://lnkd.in/eqQC3Z3s
To enhance the growth of your law firm and to receive a free demonstration of Clio - the leading cloud-based practice management software to help our clients grow, maintain, and run their practice, kindly get in touch --> morgan@simplifiedva.com
