There is a lot of advice out there on how to succeed at legal marketing. Success does not depend on your efforts being complicated or difficult. It just needs to be realistic and sensible. Consultant Bob Denney does that by offering his 20 legal marketing maxims on Attorney at Work that brings us back to basics.
The following is my list of 10 favorites from his list (with some thoughts in parentheses), although I commend to your reading his complete post of all twenty:
- Be the best lawyer you can be. Otherwise you really ought to find something else to do. If you’re not trying your best, clients will realize it and your practice will suffer in time);
- Don’t sell. Educate. Listen to clients’ problems and concerns. Then educate them on their legal options and how you might help them;
- Focus. Specialize. (You really can’t be all things to all people, but how narrow your focus should be will depend on your location. You can be more of a general practitioner in a smaller, rural area than you can be in a large metropolitan area. In the latter, you will need to be more highly specialized to be found among the competition);
- Have a marketing plan and follow it. (In my experience lawyers can be pretty darn good at planning, but I have seen too many fall down when it comes to implementing the plan. When they get busy it is easy to overlook the need to feed the pipeline for more work.)
- Market like you were a sole practitioner. If you don’t you may soon be one. (It continues to amaze me to see mid-level and even more senior partners who are just not contributing to the business development efforts of their firms. I have seen such lawyers cut loose in more than one of my in-house marketing positions);
- Current clients are your best sales agents. (Well, that assumes that they are happy campers and that you done a good job at No. 1 above);
- Relationship building and word-of-mouth still best at gaining clients. (Social media can contribute to both, but in the end I completely agree with Denney);
- Know your client’s business. (In surveying clients for law firms, I am no longer surprised to hear their frustration about lawyers not knowing and understanding their business. That includes law firms they have used more than once);
- Treat every client as if he or she were your only client. (Excellent advice and furtherance of No.1 above); and
- Under-promise. Over-deliver. (The reverse is a death knell. Don’t just meet your deadline, but exceed it by a day or more).
Enough said!