A reporter, Nora Lockwood Tooher, with Lawyers Weekly USA (subscription required to get copy of article by Tooher) asked several bloggers to identify their top five legal marketing mistakes that law firms make. Among them Jim Calloway, Gerry Riskin, Larry Bodine and yours truly. Without infringing on copyright laws, I thought I would share in a general sense the respective mistakes, starting with Jim.
His include:
1.Failure to have a web site (without one in this day and age, your firm may not even be considered by a prospective client. See my post “Promise Yourself You’ll Get a Website in 2006”),
2.Only market when your not busy (you may not have funds to spend on marketing at that time, and developing business is a long term process. It is necessary to always be feeding the pipeline),
3.No formal marketing budget (or spending heavily on one event and not having any funds available for other opportunities during the year. This reflects a lack of planning, generally.),
4.No written marketing plan (thereby failing to establish goals and objectives, which only confirms the advice of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland which to paraphrase “if you do not know where you are going, any road will take you there.”), and
5.Not focusing on relationships (since we are in the people business, how we interact with and otherwise treat clients (and others), will have a profound impact on future business).
Thanks, Jim. Next time, we’ll cover Gerry Riskin’s top 5.