Podcast
Podcast Image

Podcast Ep. 123: Why Law Firm Marketing is Never “One and Done”

by Talia Schwartz • December 17th, 2020 • Podcast

On this episode of the Legal Marketing 2.0 Podcast, Guy Alvarez discusses why marketing never stops with Allison Williams, the founder and CEO of Law Firm Mentor. Law Firm Mentor is a business coaching service for solo and small law firms that helps lawyers to grow their revenues, crush chaos in business and make more money. Law Firm Mentor was born out of Allison’s personal experience creating a law firm and scaling it into a multi-million-dollar enterprise in just 3 and a ½ years. You can connect with Allison on LinkedIn.

Podcast Show Notes

What goes into a marketing plan for a law firm?

What goes into the plan is how much money you’re going to make and over which verticals. You want to increase the number of places that people can see you and increase the likelihood that they’re going to refer to you and that requires a very strategic plan.

So I always tell people, I want you to envision a funnel. And at the top of the funnel, you have the impressions, the impressions being the eyes on your marketing source. And then from there, you’re going to generate leads. That’s when you start moving down the funnel. Not all leads will be viable of course but a certain percentage of those will become clients.

You need various tactics including SEO, your website, social media marketing and those need to be planned out and budgeted for in advance. All of these tactics work together to create an omnipresence.

How important is specialization and focusing on one or maybe two practice areas?

Well, I think that is very, very critical, especially nowadays because the legal consumer is so much more educated and has so much more access to information than even a decade ago.

So if you’re a small law firm and have 15 different things that you specialize in and that you advertise, you’re pretty much saying that anything that walks through the door can be a client. If that’s how you’re functioning, don’t think that the average consumer isn’t going to be thinking “how much time is going into the type of case that I have?”

Again, look at it from the consumer perspective. If you’re spending 10% of your time on a practice area as opposed to 100% of your time on a practice area or even 50% of your time, the consumer is inherently going to recognize that you are less qualified because you have fewer hours in and you have less knowledge.

You also don’t want to spread your marketing budget too thin, marketing yourself across too many different practice areas.

How big a role should digital marketing play in a law firm’s marketing plan, especially now with the pandemic?

Even before Covid-19 and all of its ramifications, digital marketing was growing and growing and growing and it still is growing. And I think that now it’s no longer an option – firms must be online.

Now I see firms that do nothing to grow themselves, other than digital marketing and I also see firms that spend 60% to 70% of their time, energy and budget online. It is critically important.

And what’s really going to impress clients and prospects is the quality of the information you lay out on your website.

How can law firm owners create omnipresence in their law firm marketing if they are busy practicing law and running a business?

Well, so it really depends on the size of firm that you have. If you are a solo lawyer, I would say you have to as quickly as possible, get to the place where you can hire out your legal work so you can spend more time on growing the firm and marketing it.

So you have to start to excuse yourself from the legal work even if you enjoy it. You have to be able to get other people to do the work alongside you. Then, I would say you should spend at least 10% of your time each week on marketing. And then as you start to grow, then at least 25% of your time needs to be devoted to marketing.

What’s one piece of advice you want lawyers to walk away with after listening to this episode?

So the one thing I always tell anyone that asks me anything about legal marketing is that marketing should never be a one and done!

That means anytime you are doing anything you need to be looking for multiple ways to mass produce that one piece of marketing content so that you can get multiple touch points out of it.

And one of the easiest ways to do this is with public speaking engagements. So if you’re somebody who does webinars or Facebook Live, then you need to have that presentation recorded and transcribed. 

Transcribing webinars and videos is cheap and then you have the ability to post clips of the recorded video with closed captioning into 1,000 different places – on your website or on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or Twitter.

The more you get into the habit of repurposing content, the less content you have to produce in order to get that feeling of omnipresence in your marketing.

Takeaway

There are many different tactics that go into a law firm’s digital marketing strategy and law firm owners should take time each week to focus on marketing their practice. Marketing should never be a “set it and forget it” practice, nor should it be a “one and done”. Every piece of marketing content builds upon itself to create multiple additional pieces of marketing content.

Share:

Are you ready to get started generating new, qualified leads?

Contact us to get started and let us help you energize your digital marketing and business development efforts.

Contact Us