Category — Marketing Plans

Chances are that when you sit down to work on your law firm marketing plan or your individual attorney marketing plan there are great long periods of well…confusion.

Total confusion as to what marketing activities you personally should be doing, total confusion as to what marketing activities your firm should be doing and…great, great, great uncertainty as to what marketing activities will bring you the most “bang” for your valuable time and financial investment.

I’ve been working on materials for a new webinar that I’m delivering next week and I thought I’d share a graphic that I’ve developed for the class with all of you.

Okay you’ve just finished your law firm marketing plan or individual attorney marketing plan.

Depending on how complex you like to make things it’s either scribbled on the back of an envelope (the “entrepreneur’s way) or it’s a “mental barfing exercise” running to several hundred pages (the “Big Law” way.)

No matter how you’ve put it together or when you put together, there’s one BIG question you have to ask yourself:

“What now????”

In spite of what I’ve said in previous articles here’s the number one reason that law firm marketing plans fail…lack of EXECUTION.

It’s almost the end of April and a lot of you who started 2008 out all “gung ho” and ready to change the world marketing wise now realize “lo and behold — NOTHING HAS CHANGED.”

Here are ten guaranteed signs that your marketing plan will fail.

1. You talked a good marketing game in January BUT you never made marketing a priority. In other words you wrote up the “big marketing plan” threw it in a drawer and went about business as usual. Marketing is an afterthought as usual–if you don’t make marketing a priority and then “live and breath” the concept how do you expect the other team members to get on board and actually execute the big “master plan?”

Can you learn something about law firm marketing plans from Dr. Phil?

Most of you are probably retching into your garbage cans right now just thinking about it.

Dr. Phil is probably the most irritating personality I can think of and I bet a lot of you would agree with me. His advice is vacuous, superficial and loaded with platitudes that I can get from any reasonably well experienced local bartender for the price of a drink.

Dr. Phil has an army of “morons” that he has collected from Oprah’s talk show and the Maury Pauvitch daily “low life spectacle” for followers.

Definition: “Matrix: Something that constitutes the place or point from which something else originates, takes form, or develops: The Greco-Roman world was the matrix for Western civilization.” Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. 2008.

Fundamental to the success of any law firm marketing campaign and any law firm marketing plan is understanding the concept of the “sales funnel.”

Yes, whether you like it or not legal services marketing (just like any other professional service such as business consulting, CPA services or even psychological counseling - think Dr. Phil) is a business and as a business it must follow the fundamental rules of marketing.