Even the most talented firms that have won awards can get stuck when it comes to growing their firm both digitally and physically. While being excellent lawyers is one skillset, getting the word out about how great you are is a completely different one. While you might feel that getting the word out is easy, it requires an entirely different marketing “mind” and skillset to generate lasting and sustainable growth for your business over the course of years. In this article, we’ll go over why a marketing consultant is essential in this day in age and how you can work with them in order to yield optimal growth for your business.
Integrated Marketing Growth
An experienced legal marketing consultant can help make sure that your brand strategy remains consistent throughout all of your marketing materials including your social media, website, video marketing tools like webinar solutions, and physical marketing tools. It is important to make sure that all of these tools share the same language across all platforms as they serve as places where you can communicate with your potential clients directly. Additionally, you will want to work with an experienced consultant that can also work with your team and train them on how external and public-facing components like phone calls, emails, and social media post reactions and communications should be handled.
Strategic Experience
When you have been in the business of providing external marketing tools to law firms as long as Lawyers Marketing Associates has, you begin to see some patterns in successful firms that use marketing tools strategically and intelligently. Consultants can share success goals and measurements while providing brand guidelines in order to remain consistent across all platforms. This kind of strategic experience is the result of years of developing brand consistency across multiple platforms and seeing what works and what doesn’t.
Because today’s consumers are so savvy and have the internet at their fingertips, they are much more likely to do the research required to find the best fit for their needs. You want to make sure you fit in properly within what they are looking for. Therefore, a strategic digital approach is necessary. A marketing consulting firm that has client experience, firm development, case management, strategic marketing, and internal development in their DNA can truly take your firm to the next level with an excellent set of communication tools that have worked for others in the past. Additionally, an experienced marketing firm can compare your market testing scores and key performance indicators to other firms of the same size and type to determine whether or not you are reaching the success you should be seeing.
Relationships and Referrals
Any legal marketing consultant worth their salt understands and recognizes that relationships are what form the building blocks of any successful legal service. Without connections with real people, it is very difficult to build and generate a referral system that can help keep your firm sustainable and thriving under any circumstance. Having solid relationships begins within the company internally and eventually extends out to your clients, community, and other potential business partnerships.
An experienced consultant can help you nurture and develop these important relationships through collaboration tools and built-in processes that can change the core way your company functions without dragging down any of the other processes that are crucial to performing properly and efficiently. Consultants that have a lot of skin in the legal game have built up their own connections and Rolodexes they can then use to help you reach the next level or whatever goal you are specifically looking to drive towards.
By helping to connect people and systems that deliver, law firm marketing associates can help develop and grow your practice to areas that you previously only dreamed of. Additionally, these stronger client and attorney referrals will only serve as a feedback loop that will serve to expand your connection base in whatever region or locality you are looking to grow in. Having a defined growth strategy that caters to the area and expertise of your law firm will only help to niche down the growth preferences and help you become the leading firm in your region.
How They Work
Before actually putting any concrete marketing plans in motion, a marketing consultant will use a scorecard to determine how you stack up against similar firms of your type and size. These are generated via in-depth reviews in multiple different categories for a combined marketing score that shows your strengths and weaknesses. The score consists of client experience, firm development, case management, strategic marketing, and internal development.
Taking a closer look into all five of these areas can give the consultant a better idea of what you are doing well and what you are not as well as where you can improve. For example, if your digital marketing platform interaction is lacking, a consultant can go deeper into that area. By doing an initial diagnosis, marketing consultants can spend more time in areas that need improvement while maintaining an eye on things that you are already doing well so you can keep up what you are doing correctly in that area.
Teamwork
Once a score has been decided upon, top marketing consultants collaborate with clients on what each of them can do to help push the needle in order to develop client relationships and further the success of the firm. This includes addressing long-overlooked challenges that have led to significant roadblocks in the firms development that can be eradicated through new techniques that may have seemed obvious but just needed to be pointed out.
Collaborating with a law firm marketing consultant can put you in a strange new territory if you haven’t thought about the effect focusing on client development could have on the long term sustainability of your business. While it might feel strange initially, you won’t want to go back to the way things were once you begin to see growth in the number of referrals you get on a weekly or monthly basis. If you are interested in growing your firm, don’t hesitate to contact us for an initial consultation today.
