Legal marketing boils down to the following proposition:
If you had real estate that you could POTENTIALLY sell for $100 million dollars but you had to invest $5million to fix it up, to put it on the right footing and do the right marketing for one full year, would you do it?
There's some quote by Donald Trump in Midas Touch about a guy putting up a For Sale sign on a dirty car being a dumb salesman. The Donald went, why on earth would you try to get people to buy a dirty car?
And this is what legal marketing is at its core. If the word, marketing, gets you down then forget about it and all the deceptive, ridiculous pictures and associations that come to your mind because of the ways others have gone at it.
Both within and outside legal.
Putting the word out about your law firm is about getting to the customers and letting them know of ways that you can assist in their work.
Now for that $5 million dollar investment.
What you will actually spend the money on and how you will spend it depends on what you want for your law firm and where you are headed. It would probably include setting up a Client Management Function which is where most of the value with your clients will be found because you can offer/receive more value from current clients.
You also set up a database, war chest on specific industries that is made relevant by conversations you have with people in said industries and with your clients from that industry so your information aligns with reality as the client sees it. A good model for this War Chest is to think of it as the first block of a global pharmaceutical company's R & D function (Merck, Swipha, Genentech).
It would also include finding out what inactive clients are up to.
But my personal favourite is Idea Development. This is because you can really do something with this from all the information and data you have about the customer, her industry, what others are coming up with in all sorts of companies all across the globe.
You marinate in and soak up this information and you try to come up with a nifty idea or plan or strategy to increase the size of the pie or transaction.
This is the work where you get to sit down and to think, to make connections between what you digest everyday and to come up with solutions to intractable and difficult matters.
Then the fun part begins. You put your ideas into play. You meet heavy resistance, rejection, excuses, outright failures and resounding triumphs.
You talk with colleagues, people from other industries and all and share your work.
This is the work of legal marketing and there is intellectual challenge to it, especially for the idea development portion of it.
Sounds like fun right?
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