Plan One Marketing Tactic At A Time And Do it Well
Stop chasing the latest legal marketing idea, until you have planned one or two solid strategies and done them well. I have seen firms over the years jump from one thing to the next without ever succeeding at any one of them. I was reminded of this after seeing a recent post by John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing.
He talks about not chasing the "next cool thing," even as he admits that he has done that himself (and me too). Better to give your full attention to one, or at most two strategies, and give them a chance to work.
In fact, his closing comment says it all. "Create one strategy, finish it, test it, improve it and use it without regret." Good advice.
Yeah, but.....does that mean that someone who, say, does seminars, should not also pursue an Internet strategy at the same time? Or should not also be building their referral network? Or upgrade their branding/image? I agree about not hopping around like someone with ADD, but I don't think most people can afford to try marketing efforts sequentially. In fact, if you believe in the "fail faster" theory of marketing, the faster you can discover what doesn't work, the faster you will find out what does. I think marketing has to move down several parallel paths at the same time.
Ideally, marketing of law firms, as well as individual lawyer efforts, could go down parallel paths. However, in my two decades of legal marketing experience, mostly in-house, I can tell you it doesn't work that way. It has more to do with the amount of time lawyers are willing (or able due to billing requirements) to spend on marketing efforts. The problem is that if they:
*undertake seminars to attract clients and then don't follow up;
*plan a networking strategy involving clients' or prospects' trade groups and then don't attend on a regular basis (or get actively involved in the organizations);
*start a quarterly newsletter that maybe is sent out once a year;
*decide to start a blog that they only post to once a month or less, and then abandon;
*have a web site that has "what's news" items more than a year old, or only articles several years old;
*etc. etc.,
they may be going down parallel paths, but, I'm sure you'd agree, ineffectively. I don't disagree with your underlying point. It's just that too many firms are not prepared to make the commitment to do so. What John Jantsch and I are talking about is that it is better to do one or two things well, than several poorly.
Sometimes, we also forget about the "burn-out" factor in marketing -- if you just pursue one marketing tactic (newsletters, seminars, websites, etc.)... it's easy to "burn out" by concentrating on just that one tactic.
By "burn out," I mean getting that same feeling you got the week before you took the bar exam... i.e., knowing that you must force yourself to study more, despite having already studied too much.
Perhaps if attorneys took on 2 or 3 marketing projects at a time, they could stay with a marketing program for a lot longer... because they could switch focus whenever they got "burned out." That way, they'll always be excited about marketing, and they'll be able to approach each project "fresh."
I have never seen "burn-out" when it comes to marketing. Mostly, I've observed the lack of "burn-in" to marketing. When a lawyer switches tactics, whether from newsletters, to seminars, to whatever, it generally has more to do with lack of commitment, ill-conceived approach, or lack of results. I have never seen a successful marketer get burned-out. With failure for reasons noted above, I have seen many a poor marketers change focus, and change focus and change focus. Burn-out isn't the reason in my opinion.
