Successful legal marketing requires good market research
Market research is one of those tasks that many people think they only have to do when they launch their law firm and are writing their law firm marketing plan. But the most successful legal marketers are regularly performing market research to determine what the market looks like and what changes have occurred since their last review of the market.
There are two types of market research – primary and secondary. Primary is focused on your firm, your practice areas, and your target market(s). Primary is generally more expensive than secondary research, but the results are more tailored to your firm. If you can afford primary research, it is a good option.
Secondary research is generally less expensive and not as focused on you and your firm, but more focused on the industry. The good news about secondary research is that there is an abundance of information available.
That is also the bad news. You will spend part of your research time sorting the wheat from the chaff when you are performing secondary research.
Some good sources of secondary research are:
- Studies from Bar associations
- White papers from conferences on your particular area of expertise
- Marketing trend studies from legal trade groups
- News release on your subject area
- Reports from research firms that conduct primary research
Many of these sources can be accessed via the internet, at little or no cost to you. Start with the organizations where you hold a membership such as your local and state bar association, the American Bar Association, any specialty groups you belong to such as the American Bankruptcy Institute etc.
These groups will have a great deal of information available on their websites that will allow you to create and update your law firm marketing plan with the latest legal marketing strategies with reports from the front lines. You will still need to sift the data to find that which is most useful to you, but you can benefit from research that someone else has paid for as you craft your legal marketing plan.
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Successful law firm marketing requires measurement and training
Earlier, I posted some information from Richard Strauch, COO at The Rainmaker Institute about creating a strong law firm marketing plan. This post continues that discussion with some thoughts on measuring the effectiveness of your legal marketing strategies. There is an old business maxim that applies here – what gets measured gets done.
First, develop reports for tracking effectiveness of marketing efforts. When you are starting out, take the time to determine what you want to know. What kind of information do you need to give effective feedback and measurement of your legal marketing strategies? When you are developing your reports, don’t just look at what data you think you will generate. Instead, design your system and your reports to generate the data you want.
Second, create metrics for quantifying ROI of all major marketing initiatives. This may sound complicated, but it really isn’t. What you want to do is create a system of measurement that allows you to track the Return on Investment, or bang for your buck, on all of your major initiatives. If an imitative costs $10,000 per year, and yields $50,000 in new business, you have a 500% ROI. But you have to be able to track both the costs and the new business that flows from that initiative.
Third, take the time to train your staff. We have said it before that the best-laid plans are useless if they are not executed well. Training your staff allows two beneficial things to happen. First, you get the data you want. Second, it frees up your time so that you can focus on the tasks that have the highest value within your law firm. You don’t want the high-dollar billing staff doing things that should be handled by junior staff or clerical staff. That is an inefficient use of your human resources.
There are a number of ways to measure your data, but you first have to decide what you want to know. Once you have that answered, you can design a measurement system that will give you the data on your law firm marketing activities that you desire.
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Marketing For Lawyers - Mistakes Attorneys Make--and How to Avoid Them, Mistake #4
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MARKETING MISTAKE 4:
NETWORKING TOO MUCH OR IN THE WRONG PLACES
I recently met an attorney who was struggling to find new clients. When I asked her the primary way she was looking for clients, I discovered she belonged to more than 30 networking groups.
Assuming she attended only one meeting from each group each month, she could have easily
visited a new event every day of the week and never hit the same one twice.
Here are the problems with that approach:
She was spending so much of her time networking that she didn’t have time to do any other lawyer marketing activity. Networking is often not the most effective form of marketing for lawyers. She didn’t have enough time to properly follow up with any leads she received during the events; she was always on the way to her next meeting.
She could probably stop attending 80-90 percent of those groups and still had the same results in her small law firm marketing plan.
In my research, I have found that networking works really great for some people, and not at all for most people. The only way to be sure which category you fit in is to track the results you achieve from particular networking groups and actively cut out the ones that don’t produce results then integrate your findings into marketing your law firm.
By asking yourself these three critical questions, you can assess the effectiveness of your networking.
1. Am I networking to my peers or my prospects? I'm continually amazed at how many business owners go to networking events in their own industry looking for new clients.
2. What is my goal in going to this networking event? Is it to:
• Find new clients?
• Build my database with prospects?
• Understand the major points of pain in my target market?
• For professional development and connecting with others in my field?
3. What results have I received from this event in the past? You have to be clear about your objective and measuring your results. Set up a simple Excel spreadsheet that tracks your results from various networking events you attend:
• How long have you consistently attended the meetings?
• How many people did you meet?
• How many were qualified prospects?
• How many face-to-face meetings or presentations did you land from that group?
• What business can you directly attribute to those meetings?
• How much longer are you willing to attend before seeing solid results?
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