Besides being a go-to high school yearbook quote, Blake’s riff on time, touches on a core principle of ineffective legal marketing: perspective. When it comes to successful legal marketing, having the perspective to differentiate tactics from strategy, a sprint from a marathon, and short term from the long term, is what establishes lasting law firms from shuttered shingles. Shorttermism is almost built into our lives now, in our businesses, in our technology and media. As we grow our book of business, and our calendars and to-do lists fill up, and the notifications start rolling in, the addressable issues and points of attention that arise day after day become so numerous that it seems like nothing stays still, or relevant, long enough to be properly addressed. And so it is with marketing and advertising for law firms. It’s something we’re calling Restless Marketing Syndrome. (RMS)
Rather than establish metrics that connect digital marketing agency performance and efforts to calls and cases in their law firms, shareholders suffering from Restless Marketing Syndrome are constantly chasing lower costs, higher promises, or the latest bandwagon. RMS sufferers are myopically focused on short-term results and expectant of long-term growth. Typically, overwhelmed by marketing advice, shallowly invested, and itinerantly focused on the next opportunity, RMS can feel like you’re running a race, not a business. According to a recent poll on social media, a fair number of lawyers feel like marketing their firm is a foot race, not a marathon. To defeat RMS, and create a lasting legacy, law firm marketing plans must balance long-term (Brand Growth) and short-term (Sales Activation) goals and metrics.
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While your competitors continue to sprint and waste their money and time comparing barrel-sizes, you should be running a marathon and building a law firm marketing plan that works on two levels – Brand Growth and Sales Activation. Les Binet and Peter Field, seminal market researchers studied thousands of brand campaigns and case studies over 60-plus years to discover the truth of effective marketing strategy → Short-term metrics will not create long-term brands. “The way in which long-term business effects are generated is fundamentally different from how most short-term metrics are produced. Although long-term effects, like a strong brand, always produce some short-term effects, the reverse is not true, and long-term effects are not simply an accumulation of short-term effects.”
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The Marketing Marathon Mindset is the antidote needed to address the symptoms and causes of Restless Marketing Syndrome. Based on pioneering market research and science, the Marketing Marathon Mindset is a framework composed of four core marketing concepts (Brand ID, Strategy, Metrics, Maintenance), which can be summarized by one simple marketing mantra: Short-term gains don’t create long-term brands. If you accept that legal skills alone are not enough to differentiate your practice, and you realize that in order to grow your law firm, you cannot rely on the compounding effects of short-term gains, then the Marketing Marathon Mindset is for you. Let’s go into detail about how you can discover your law firm’s brand, and then use that brand to guide strategic, measurable, and business-aligned marketing decisions that create a lasting legacy.
Brand ID
Fully understanding your law firm’s brand is the essential first step in defining how you run the Marketing Marathon. Depending on the way your law firm packages perception in the public marketplace, your brand defines the marketing strategies you’ll employ to attain the desired business goals you’ve set out to achieve. Without a brand, there’s no strategic guidance when it comes to business development. So lawyers waste a ton of time and money, employing a wide array of marketing tactics that end up being ineffective and costly. This brandless, unguided chaos ends up leaving lawyers with the impression that marketing doesn’t work. Go figure. Branding is typically seen as something only larger and more prominent businesses get to play around with. While it’s nice to fantasize about transforming our law firms to be more like Zappos, or Uber, or whoever is the marketing darling du jour, the concerns and demands of running a business soon outweigh the seeming importance of creating a brand for it. But, knowing your brand is the first step to finding your place in the Marketing Marathon. There is a rhythm that is all your own. Defining your brand is the perfect way to instill confidence in your law firm development, and confidence breeds success and success is all part of the strategy.
Strategy
To run the Marketing Marathon, outlast your competition, and make it to the end goal (a prominent and lasting legacy for your law firm), a strategy is not just essential, it’s imperative. The fact that the vast majority of your competition in the legal space thinks they are running a sprint when it comes to their marketing should feel like a huge weight has been lifted off of your shoulders. Your competition blasts through their budgets early, exhaust their reserves after a few laps, pushes themselves to convert faster and in shorter windows, and burns through tactics to get ahead now, all while thinking they’ll gain wholesome benefits tomorrow? The law firm that counters this narrative with a strategic understanding of how marketing should create both growth and sales, or what we call Legal Marketing Nutrition (LMN), runs their law firm on a more confident and relaxed course. Metrics Another benefit to running a marketing marathon vs. a sprint is that you have a holistic understanding of not only what tactics it takes to survive the long distances you’ve committed to, but also where in the course you need to implement those tactics and by how much. Marketing metrics (lead tracking, Cost Per Case, Cost Per Lead, channel ROI) and business metrics (CRM, intake conversions, sales, and profit) are both critical to measuring and optimizing your law firm development tactics. Along with running a marathon like a sprint, most law firm owners are failing to capture the most basic marketing metrics at their firm. Our informal polls show that almost 60 percent of law firms currently have no idea how to measure CPL or CPC, both essential metrics to understanding marketing effectiveness.
Brand Growth and Sales Activation, the two modalities of law firm development, must be measured in different ways to demonstrate their impacts. A branded ad campaign won’t perform the same as a direct sales campaign. It’s safe to assume that a large portion of your constituent runners on this path are not measuring their law firm’s business performance. So even just the beginnings of an attempt to measure marketing effectiveness at your law firm can lead to insights and curiosity that could drive the changes necessary for advancement.
Maintenance
How can you cultivate the final step of the Marketing Marathon Mindset – maintenance – to ensure that your marketing strategies continue to maintain their pace while perennially developing new opportunities to grow your book of business? Curiosity. Curiosity is maniacally encouraged in the beginning stages of developing an idea or concept, but curiosity isn’t really encouraged through-out the lifecycle of those ideas or concepts. The further we advance in our businesses, the further we dial down the curiosity so as to seemingly increase stability and decrease the likeliness for failure. A service industry like law is dependent on clients, and clients are people. So the landscape your law firm operates in and the strategies necessary to expand your business and maintain market share change as the habits and behaviors of people and culture change. Curiosity is the only way to monitor and/or anticipate these huge cultural changes. Lawyers should develop the curiosity to notice patterns in culture, in advertising, in their law firms, and use that curiosity to create new goals, campaigns, and business models.
In Conclusion
We hope we’ve convinced you to switch gears in the way you chart the course for your law firm development and address your own symptoms of Restless Marketing Syndrome along the way. By adopting the Marketing Marathon Mindset and developing your marketing strategy around the mantra, “short-term gains don’t make long-term brands,” the path toward establishing a lasting legacy, making long-term gains, and leaving your current competition in the dust, will be crystal clear. ◆
