The small-firm marketing guide
Marketing is difficult enough for any lawyer, but for those in sole practice or in small firms, the task of creating and implementing a marketing plan can seem overwhelming. So we’ve produced this invaluable guide to marketing a smaller law practice.
By James Raiswell
"Marketing is so basic, it cannot be considered a separate function of the business. It is the whole business, seen from the point of view of its final result — that is, from the customer’s point of view."
- Peter F. Drucker, The Practice of Management
If you asked most lawyers about marketing, some would start talking about placing Yellow Pages ads, handing out business cards at Kiwanis meetings, offering free half-hour consultations, and basically "getting your name out on the street." It’s about raising your profile in the marketplace, they’d say. They wouldn’t be wrong.
Other lawyers would say that the successful and ethical practice of law is all the marketing they need. Marketing, they’d say, is actually about delivering excellent service to your customer base on time and on budget — that’s what ensures repeat business and guarantees that your clients will seek out your services when they have pressing legal matters. They wouldn’t be wrong, either.
But delivering good work at a good price, and engaging in rudimentary business promotion, is less than half the story. Beneath the surface, there’s much more to marketing than this. As Drucker implies, marketing shouldn’t be regarded as a complementary aspect of business development; it’s the essential aspect of business development. It’s about knowing who you are and what you want to do as a professional.
Marketing is a continuing and largely cerebral process. As much as it’s about getting your name out into the market — into your target market, more precisely — it’s also about knowing what market you want, understanding how to reach that market, and most importantly, answering the fundamental question: "Why should a client choose my services over those of my competitors?"
In the final analysis, how you market your practice has a tremendous amount of influence on how you are perceived by the client. Done well, marketing can yield tremendous benefit to your firm, with comparatively little money invested. It’s the key to a successful legal business.
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Developing a marketing plan
A good marketing plan, one that forms the basis for the future direction of the practice, must include several key elements. Here are six steps to developing a marketing.
1. Key elements
A good plan should include the following: the services to be provided and the client groups to be served, the methodology and client care policies for service delivery, the practice’s resources (including skills and knowledge), and the ways in which the practice can be developed to attain these objectives.
2. Mission and goals
Make sure your plan is consistent with your practice’s mission and goals. A marketing plan should be akin to a roadmap — your practice’s goals are the destination on the map, and your practice’s mission will help you plot your route.
3. Current services
Review the current quality and level of your business activities. Do you have all the work you want or can handle right now? Or do you want to re-examine your practice and its client base? If it’s the latter, be prepared to upgrade your current services.
4. Current clients
Regardless of your answers to the foregoing questions, concentrate primarily on developing your existing client base. Word-of-mouth recommendations are the most effective form of marketing, so client satisfaction must be your highest priority.
5. Implement the plan
Decide how to put the plan into action. What is the best mix of communications options — Website, advertising, public relations — by which your firm can promote itself? Take into account the cost to the business versus the potential client audience. Create a timetable and a budget, and always leave room for flexibility.
6. Monitor the response
Ensure that there are arrangements in place for monitoring the results of the marketing effort. In particular, make sure you keep records of the sources of referrals (see the second sidebar for more details).
Adapted from The Lawyers’ Guide to Good Management, to be published by the CBA’s Lawyers Care Initiative in May 2004.
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Poorly done, however, marketing can be expensive, time-consuming and detrimental, especially for sole practitioners and small law firms, whose resources are limited and whose budgets and resources are too often stretched thin. Getting marketing right isn’t an option — it’s critical.
National has spoken with three leading marketing experts to find out how a small firm or sole practice should market itself — how to prepare, how to execute, and how to measure results. The Small-Firm Marketing Guide tells you what you need to know about marketing and gives you the tools to start planning and implementing your marketing efforts. And "plan," as we’ll soon see, is a crucial word.
The marketing plan
"As much as anything else, it’s the work a firm does in planning its marketing strategy that is the most important aspect of its marketing efforts," says Lexcore Communications president Elizabeth Cordeau of Calgary. "Marketing isn’t just the act of selling your firm. It’s knowing what you have to sell and to whom you’re trying to sell it."
The most common mistake a firm can make — legal practice or otherwise — is to enter the marketplace with no clear ideas in this regard. In legal terms, it means hanging out your shingle without knowing what types of clients you really want to see come through the door. You need a practice area and a market (or client base) to whom to promote your practice.
The first step, then, in any good marketing plan is to divest yourself of the notion that you want to "practise law generally," and instead to focus on a specific area you want to practise. Marketing experts advise you to pick an area of law in which you’re interested — you probably have several you can choose from — and one that is under-served or emerging in the marketplace.
By focusing your practice in this sense, it becomes easier to complete the second step in developing a marketing plan: deciding to whom you’re going to market your services. If your answer to the question "Who’s your market?" is "Everybody," then you need to go back and start again — especially in a small practice.
"The smaller the firm, the more focused the practice area should be," says Susan Van Dyke of Van Dyke Marketing and Communication in Vancouver. "Small firms have to be careful not to fall into the trap of being all things to all clients. You can’t be a generalist and a specialist at the same time."
Her suggestion to newer and smaller firms is to focus their efforts on creating business in specific areas of a market, or to go a step further and offer vertically aligned services in one market — become a specialist in all aspects of construction law, for example.
Milt Zwicker, one of the principals of Orillia, Ontario-based Zwicker, Evans & Lewis, says that any new firm’s focus should be a direct reflection of the needs of the local market. His firm previously focused its efforts on real estate law, but recent changes to Ontario’s Condominium Act, coupled with an aging population, offered a new opportunity. Zwicker, Evans & Lewis shifted its focus to jointly practise elder law and condominium law, two growth industries in Ontario.
Focusing your practice not only allows your firm to target specific client bases, but it also helps it develop its own competitive advantage. It’s easy to assume that your firm’s ability to provide good legal advice is its competitive advantage. In reality, however, two facts stand in the way of this belief:
1. Every firm claims to offer top-quality legal advice, including those that offer downright shoddy service.
2. The nature of legal services is such that few clients understand the difference between good and poor performance anyway. "It’s too technical for many clients to understand," says Van Dyke.
Keep it simple
To be truly successful, your firm needs to identify itself in the marketplace. Van Dyke says a lot of law firms could go a long way towards improving their standing in the market with just a few simple changes in the way in which they do business with clients. "You have to consider the total client experience as part of your marketing efforts," says Van Dyke. "And part of the way your firm can distinguish itself is by managing that experience."
The rules here are simple:
1. Keep a well-maintained office in an accessible location.
2. Train staff to be as friendly as possible.
3. Return phone calls promptly.
4. Greet clients with enthusiasm.
5. Don’t be afraid to refer matters to other specialists if you don’t have the answer yourself.
The key is to make the experience as easy on the client as possible. "In the end, lawyers are in the service sector," she notes. "How a lawyer responds to a client’s needs — quite apart from the legal advice provided — is critical."
Once you’ve established your niche and your target clientele, you need to set down a series of goals and objectives for the future development of your practice. After all, "if you don’t have a destination in mind," observes Van Dyke, "then any road will take you there."
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Evaluating your marketing activities
To ensure success, your firm must be constantly assessing and reassessing its marketing activities, with a view to refining the process and eliminating any problems. Here are four important elements to remember when checking your results.
1. Monitor your activities to ensure that the marketing plan is being followed and the budget is being met, and evaluate your marketing performance against the key objectives in your plan. Are you getting the results you wanted? Why or why not?
2. Identify the areas in which the performance you’re getting varies significantly from your plan. What’s gone wrong? Decide on and implement a course of action to correct the situation and to minimize any adverse effects.
3. Clarify any ambiguous information that you might be receiving from your monitoring activities. Do you have insufficient data, or could the results be due to other causes? Decide why the picture is unclear, and take steps to clarify it.
4. Ensure that the key people in your practice stay in the loop. Provide them the information you’re collecting promptly, ensuring that confidentiality is maintained. Communicate any changes in the plan or changes in people’s responsibilities.
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An effective marketing plan will set out not only where a law practice is today, but where it wants to be further down the road, three to five years from now. Some of your goals might include increasing your client base, reaching projections for growth, and possibly expanding your business into other practice areas. Remember to leave room for flexibility in the plan.
"Developing a marketing plan isn’t necessarily an easy process," says Cordeau. "It requires a lot of time and energy and resources to be done properly." Time spent producing a marketing plan can seem like billable hours wasted, but in fact, planning is the most critical part of the marketing process.
If you feel out of your element producing a marketing plan, take a few moments to jot down your ideas concerning practice focus, goals and client base, and then consult a professional. Much of the process of developing a marketing plan requires input from the firm’s manager, but a professional marketing consultant can help refine and optimize the plan to deliver the best results.
Implementation
With a marketing plan in place, the actual process of implementation should follow fairly easily. For example, if your practice is commodity- or consumer-based, consider targeting clients through general advertising, similar to personal injury lawyers placing ads in the Yellow Pages. If your practice focuses on more specialized markets, you might want to use trade media aimed at that specific audience.
Of course, advertising is just one way in which your firm can get its message out to clients. A more cost-effective vehicle is the World Wide Web, which provides an excellent opportunity to offer at the very least an online brochure of sorts, accessible to clients at any time.
Going a step further, consider providing profiles of each lawyer and his or her accomplishments in their field — client testimonials would be great — as well as some commentary on recent developments affecting your particular area of practice. Advanced Website features could include answers to FAQs, basic legal information, and lawyer-written articles. Successful law firm sites take their work product and convert it into a Web product.
The difficulty with even the best-designed Websites, of course, is getting them noticed among the billions of pages in cyberspace. Your first step, therefore, should be to register a domain name that is easily and intuitively associated with your practice — www.yourpracticename.com is the best place to start.
Getting noticed by a search engine is tougher. You can submit your site directly to a search engine (e.g., Google) for a fee, so that Web users will find it more easily. Another method is to incorporate "magnets" into the site’s coding to attract search engine attention. Provide a specific description of your site in the page’s title, or include "meta tags," special coding tags that allow you to specify commonly used keywords.
Zwicker is a great believer in client-focused newsletters. His firm publishes four different newsletters, each about four times a year, updating clients on news and developments in elder law, condominium law and any areas of overlap in between. Zwicker and his team produce and distribute the newsletters electronically — never more than two pages — and have received a lot of positive feedback from their clients as a result.
Of course, networking is one of the most effective marketing tools that a sole or small-firm practitioner can have — and it’s fairly inexpensive to implement, too. By joining business and community groups and volunteering to speak at industry and community events, you can quickly establish yourself as an expert in the field and as the first point of contact for any potential client.
Going a step further, Cordeau and Van Dyke both suggest that lawyers take advantage of the mainstream media as an effective marketing tool.
"Lawyers would do well to make themselves available to the local media for comment on legal matters in their practice area, or offer to write a column or provide other materials," says Cordeau. "There is a tremendous opportunity to get your name out to the public as an expert in your practice area, and to drive business to your practice as a result."
No matter what strategies you employ to promote your firm in the marketplace, it’s important to remember that marketing is a fluid process. Even the best-laid marketing plans will go awry if they are not constantly revisited and updated to ensure efficiency and consistency with the firm’s goals.
A significant part of determining marketing’s worth is to ask for feedback from clients, new and old. Have they seen any of your marketing efforts, and did they respond positively to these efforts? Feedback of this type is invaluable in determining the worth of new marketing strategies.
What makes marketing such a complex process is the fact that there simply is no single catch-all strategy through which every law firm — or indeed every business — can market itself to the public with maximum efficiency. The best strategy, say the experts, is to start modestly, and to think like a client.
James Raiswell is the Assistant Editor of National. His previous article, "The world next door," about global law firms networks, appeared in our November, 2003 issue.
Illustration: Erico Varrasso
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english
Marketing pour cabinets de petite taille
Parce que l’élaboration d’une stratégie marketing peut s’avérer difficile pour ceux qui pratiquent en solo ou au sein d’un cabinet de petite taille, nous avons fait appel à trois experts qui nous prodiguent leurs conseils.
En matière de marketing, chaque juriste a sa recette. Pour certains, il s’agira de distribuer des cartes d’affaires au cours de soupers organisés par diverses associations, d’offrir des consultations gratuites ou de savoir bien s’annoncer dans les Pages jaunes. Pour d’autres, le travail bien fait et une excellente réputation constituent la seule publicité nécessaire.
Bien que chacun de ces « trucs » puisse être efficace sous certains aspects, ils ne sont que la pointe de l’iceberg de ce que devrait être le marketing : une démarche planifiée essentielle au développement d’une entreprise.
Un plan
« Lorsqu’il est question de marketing, il ne s’agit pas uniquement de vendre les services de votre cabinet, il vous faut connaître ce que vous avez à vendre et à qui vous tentez de le vendre », affirme Elizabeth Cordeau, présidente de Lexcore Communications à Calgary.
Il est préférable de s’écarter de l’idée d’une pratique « générale » et de plutôt focaliser sur un champ de pratique précis. Les experts du marketing vous recommandent de choisir un domaine qui vous intéresse et qui serait mal desservi ou en émergence. Il vous sera ensuite plus simple de déterminer qui constituera votre clientèle.
« Plus le cabinet est petit, plus son domaine de pratique doit être ciblé », explique Susan Van Dyke de Van Dyke Marketing et Communication de Vancouver. « Les petits cabinets doivent se garder de faire de tout pour tous […] » Pour ce faire, elle suggère d’offrir des services intégrés dans un marché précis, par exemple, devenir un expert de tous les aspects de la construction.
Pour Milt Zwicker de chez Orillia, la branche ontarienne de Zwicker, Evans & Lewis, la spécialisation d’un cabinet doit se faire en fonction d’un nouveau besoin du marché. Son propre bureau qui oeuvrait en matière de droit immobilier a choisi de s’orienter vers le droit relatif à la copropriété et aux personnes âgées compte tenu des changements récents au Condominium Act de l’Ontario et du vieillissement de la population.
De nos jours, il est devenu cliché d’affirmer que pour obtenir du succès, il est important de se faire connaître de la clientèle. Selon Van Dyke, il est tout aussi important de se démarquer. Un cabinet arrivera à se distinguer d’un autre en rendant l’expérience vécue par le client la plus simple possible.
Quelques règles de base contribueront à l’atteinte de ce résultat :
1. Disposer d’un bureau bien maintenu et facile d’accès.
2. Former son personnel pour qu’il soit tout sourire.
3. Retourner les appels rapidement.
4. Afficher son enthousiasme.
5. Ne pas craindre de référer à un spécialiste les questions pour lesquelles on ne dispose pas d’une réponse.
Avec un domaine de pratique précis et une clientèle bien identifiée, il ne restera plus, afin de compléter votre plan, qu’à vous fixer des buts et objectifs à atteindre. « Si vous n’avez aucune destination en tête, aucune route ne permettra de vous y rendre », illustre Van Dyke.
Action
Après la conception, vient la mise en œuvre du plan, c’est-à-dire attirer l’attention de vos clients éventuels. Pour ce faire, il est essentiel de bien choisir votre médium.
Le Web constitue une façon économique de rejoindre vos futurs clients en plus de les faire bénéficier d’une valeur ajoutée. Il vous permet d’afficher le profil de chacun des avocats du cabinet, de faire part de leurs principales réussites, de créer un espace pour les questions les plus fréquemment posées et de commenter la jurisprudence récente sur un sujet.
Un bulletin de liaison électronique focalisant sur les intérêts du client, du réseautage au sein d’associations d’affaires et bénévoles, la présentation de conférences permettent aussi de se positionner rapidement comme expert dans un domaine et d’agir comme personne ressource auprès d’un client.
Enfin, selon Cordeau et Van Dyke, les juristes négligeraient trop souvent d’utiliser les médias de masse à leur profit. « Les juristes auraient intérêt à se rendre disponibles aux médias locaux pour commenter des enjeux juridiques qui relèvent de leur domaine ou à proposer d’écrire une chronique », suggère Cordeau. « Il s’agit d’une façon efficace de se faire connaître du public. »
Un dernier conseil de nos experts? D’abord savoir qu’un plan de marketing se doit d’être flexible afin de s’adapter aux situations. Et sur une note plus philosophique, se souvenir qu’une pratique couronnée de succès se construit, un client à la fois. |
