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1: What is a strategic marketing plan?
2: Do I really need to plan?
3: Let’s Get Training!
4: Highlights from the Practice Development Webinar!
We have the highlights from the webinar right here! This section has our favorite parts, attendee’s favorite sections, and the take-aways we think you should have on-hand. Check out these excerpts from the transcript:
“The strategic marketing plan, so often, is one of the law practice management tools that goes off your radar as a busy practicing lawyer. You forget about the fact that we need to have that plan in place to move you forward, your goals reached, and to reach your productivity boost. With business plans, marketing plans and really any planning tools like handbooks, manuals, and policies, in law firms, they are the first things that go out the window when you get so very busy…but you need to adjust your mindset to make sure that you can have these foundational pieces in place. If we don’t have the foundation, the groundwork, the baseline, if we don’t know where we’re starting from, it’s hard to grow… we don’t think about having this plan in place and measuring those statistics and metrics and tactics we need to reach our goals….
….we want to make sure you have a plan in place to implement and follow and act on to make sure that you have that trajectory that you need for your firm to grow, to know what works, and sometimes what doesn’t, what we need to revisit or what needs to go back to the drawing board.Even for those of you who have very steady business coming into your firm, there’s always room to grow. We want to think about what your goals are, not just this year but well into the future… How do we improve on them? How do we solidify them? How do we strengthen them with objectives and tactics and implementation to make sure that you get where you’re going? Where do you need to put your time in because you do have a limited amount of time? Where do we put your marketing spend when you have a limited budget? Where do you put those things in in order to get the most ROI, the most return on investment? …
Part of this marketing plan is to really know when you drive business to your firm where is it going. I work with many attorneys who will say, “Well, it’s going to my firm, and I practice family law,” or “I practice elder law,” or “I practice criminal defense.” That’s a practice area. You need to dive down and get into the nitty-gritty of how you operate. What are your legal services? What do you charge? How do we get business to those specific legal services? What does the cost of acquisition look like for each legal service?
If you haven’t had that deep dive into your operations, now is the time. We want to do that because we want to make sure that you’re profitable on the law practice management side which will directly impact the marketing side. When you say, “People come to me for estate planning,” it’s not enough. We need to dive deeper into that service and say, “Well, what are you doing, charging, offering in estate planning?” Estate planning can mean many things… I really want you to dive into your operations as we’re thinking about this for your marketing plan. What are your legal services? What are your practice areas? Where have we seen that three part of that equation analysis? Where have we seen growth, success, and analysis this past year? …
… I want to walk you through our strategic marketing plan. You’re going to start with your goal. In the next couple of slides, I’m going to give you some marketing goal examples, so you can get comfortable with them and how you will write them yourself. You could just go from goals straight into your strategies (but you would be missing a key ingredient). The key ingredient is the“why” in what you are doing in your practice. The “why” is extremely important! You’re going to write your goals, but why do those goals for your law practice matter? Why are you taking your valuable time to do this?
From your goals, you’re going to go to the why your goals matter to you. Then we’re going to support your goals with strategies. From there, we support the strategies with tactics, tactics that we’re going to follow that will make the strategies happen. Next is implementation. So often, I see plans that have strategies and tactics but no implementation, no timeline, no action. We have to have that implementation. If you don’t, you will never get it done because, again, you’re too busy, you don’t have time to implement. You move on to the next work crisis because implementation isn’t easy. ..
…Next add in that evaluation time monthly and then quarterly. We’re going to look at that as we go forward…”
5: Evaluation time: Where are you right now?
These are our six best practice questions to get you started in a meaningful evaluation of where you are in your law practice marketing.
- Did you follow a marketing plan this year? Include when you created it and gauge how closely you followed it throughout the year.
- Who worked on your strategic marketing plan with you? Identify where you implemented roles and tasks to complete specific tactics.
- How frequently did you assess your progress? Describe any successes or corrections you implemented as a result of your evaluation.
- Were your goals met? Exceeded? Not a good fit?
- What were your best sources of business? Describe the practice areas and legal services that generated the best return on investment. Where possible identify the cost of acquisition.
- How would you gauge your community saturation?
6: Practice42’s 4 Part Approach
- Seminars and Events
- Local Community Network
- Client Family Development, and
- Integrated Digital Marketing
7: Putting the strategic marketing plan together in your firm
Instead, it is a very tangible business tool. You simply need to know how to create the business plan and use it going forward in your law firm. This is not to say it will be completely without difficulty and uncertainty as you begin. The marketing plan can be hard for us because we’re not marketers, we’re lawyers. Most of us didn’t go to business school or communication school. We went to law school, which makes us excellent lawyers, but we don’t necessarily know the tactics and strategies that come together to help us reach our goals.
Our goal is to give you a Strategic Marketing Plan you can use. As with all the things we do at practice42, we want to enable you to develop a practical approach to the marketing plan to run your law firm. We want you to be able to use this practical marketing plan, thereby consistently raising your community visibility, which will get more potential clients in your door to meet with you and will generate more revenue over the course of the next year.
What are the elements of a practical, strategic marketing plan for your firm? Click here to download practice42’s Strategic Marketing Plan Template to use toward your success.
Need more? Download our 6 Step Strategic Marketing Process infographic.
8: Additional Resources that accompany this Practice Development section
The REAL Business Plan Your Law Firm Needs
Integrated Digital Marketing Strategy
7 Thank Yous This Holiday Season
Bar Meeting Survival Guide
In this specific training section, we also include external resources you may want to check out to assist you in your paperless journey:
Start with Why By: Simon Sinek (Available on Amazon)
It’s Not About You By: Bob Burg and John David Mann (Available on Amazon)