4 Steps To Create A Small Law Firm Marketing Plan

For principals and managing partners of small law firms it has become harder than ever to decide the right direction for your marketing and figure out the best way to develop a marketing plan for your law firm.

Often the desire to talk and focus on a “marketing plan” results in a talk and focus on “marketing tactics” such as social media, SEO, online advertising, Yelp and Google Business Profile.  These tactics should be elements you use as part of your overall marketing plan but not the core focus.

In order to help alleviate some of this marketing confusion, I’ve created this guide using 4 concrete steps to create a small law firm marketing plan. You can use this article to help you create a clear marketing message, direction, and strategy.

The 4 steps needed to create a marketing plan for your law firm:

1. Separate Ideal Clients From Not So Ideal Clients
2. Define The Real Problem You Solve
3. Guide Clients Through the Buying Journey
4. Make Content a Relationship-Building Workhorse

Client Separation

First, you need to separate your existing client base into ideal and not ideal.  It's time to only work with the people your law firm are best suited for – IDEAL clients. This doesn't necessarily mean that you chuck the other clients, but experience tells me that if you are working with clients today, some percentage of them are not profitable for your law firm. 

The majority of your clients are actually detractors for your law firm because they didn't have the right problem, the right circumstances or they didn't have the right situation that your legal services could solve. 

Now all you need is the right formula to discover what profitable clients looks like in the most specific way possible.

Think about your client base today and rank them into groups by profitability first and referability second with your most profitable clients at the top. You want to think in terms of profitability and referability because they are both linked to an ideal client fit. It’s also important to understand if it’s a certain case value, practice area, legal situation, or lawsuit, that results in the most profit. 

One of the things that I've discovered is that in many cases your ideal clients are ones that have the right challenge, the right problem solved, received value, are getting a great experience and they referred your law firm to others. If you understand who your profitable clients are you can start to do two things;

First, you can generate more business from your top 20% of clients because that top 20% wants to do more business with you. If you focus your efforts on creating an amazing experience for those clients who already trust, get value, and are referring you to others. You could actually build not only your marketing plan but sales, service, billing, follow up - the whole law firm -  around serving and attracting them. 

Second, if you know who they are and what brought them to you, you can begin to build a ideal client persona for your law firm based on historical data, profitability and referability.

Solve The Real Problem

Now that you know who your ideal client is, the next step in creating a small law firm marketing plan is to figure out what problem you are actually solving for your clients. 

Here’s the cold, hard truth—nobody cares about you or what you sell (and nobody will ever care as much about what you’re selling as you do). They just want their problem solved. While your business may be incredible, all your customers and prospects care about is what they want and need, and they’ll go with the business that promised them that.⠀

So instead of just selling legal advice, communicate to them that you understand and that you get their problem. Help them see that your legal services is the solution to their problem. That is when they will start to listen to you and begin to trust you. 

So how do you do this?  You create a core message that promises to solve that problem. 

Let’s say you own a small business law firm. Your potential customers will automatically assume that you know how to provide small business legal advice.

But that doesn’t really address the problem the potential client has.

For most clients, their biggest problem associated with a small business law firm is about something beyond the legal advice the firm provides. Clients hate attorney’s that do not return phone calls in a timely manner, make them a priority, and personalize advice to them.

These are the real problems your clients have. So your marketing message is not, “We know how to provide legal advice” — of course, you do!

Instead, it’s “We are small business lawyers that timely return your calls & make you a priority."

Now, you are probably asking yourself, how do I do this for my small law firm? How do I know the problem I am solving? What you need to do is get on the phone or in-person and talk to your ideal clients and ask them:

⭐why did you decide to hire us or buy from us initially?
⭐ how did you find us in the first place?

⭐what’s the one thing we should never stop doing?

⭐ why did you stick with us? 

⭐what’s one thing we could do to create a better experience for you?
⭐ if you were to refer us what would you say?
⭐what would you Google to find a service/product like ours?

I can almost guarantee you're going to start hearing themes that address the actual problem that you're solving.

Those are some questions you can start with, but be sure to go deeper in your line of questioning. Have your customers go into detail with their answers. Don’t just ask, “Were you happy with my service?” Instead ask, “Can you tell me a specific time when we provided good service and what we did to make it such a positive experience?”

After enough of these informational interviews, you are going to start hearing themes that are addressing the real problems that you solve.

Now another great place to uncover these problems is your reviews. But instead of just paying attention to five-star reviews, read the actual reviews line by line. When people voluntarily turn to a third party like Google and leave a glowing review it is an indicator that they have been thoroughly impressed. You have exceeded their expectations. You have solved their problem. 

Here people are saying the things that you need to know, the things that you that they really love about you your firm or the things that they don't like about what you do.

I'll give you a quick example.

We had a massage practice that talks all about having the best tables, oils, and most highly skilled therapist but all their customers seem to care about is that their pain and discomfort go away.

So that’s the promise they need to communicate, shout about and promote. The rest is an expectation — I mean doesn’t everyone in the massage business have the best tables and highly skilled therapist.

What is the real problem that you are solving? That is what you need to uncover. And once you know it needs to be what you lead with for all of your messaging, it is your core message.

Guide Clients Through the Buying Journey

Customers have buying questions and objectives, and these will change along the various stages of their journey with your law firm. It’s your job to guide clients through the journey, taking them through the logical steps of getting to become aware of your law firm, educated about your firm practice areas, sampling your firm's expertise, purchasing your law firm services and referring your law firm.

In just the last handful of years, marketing has undergone many changes. The thing that has changed the most about marketing is how people choose to become clients. That marketing funnel and that linear path no longer exist. The buying journey today is holistic and nonlinear. You no longer see an advertisement for a product, visit the store, and purchase that product. The steps between awareness and purchase are diverse and varied and oftentimes intertwined. People make decisions about the products and the services that they buy out of our direct control. Marketing today is less about demand and more about organizing behavior. 

This obsession with funnels and funnel hacking and tactics is really driving a lot of challenges for principals and managing partners of small law firms. First and foremost, we have to understand how to guide people on the journey that they want to go on. 

To make sure you’re providing clients with what they need at each stage, start by asking questions. In the awareness phase, the essential question for a law firm to answer is, “If someone didn’t know about us, where would they go to find a law firm like ours?” For most law firms, the primary answer to that question is referral. But in the law firm example, you also might have prospects that search on Google.

Once you’ve done that for the awareness phase, you move on to the other four stages of the journey. Once they find your website, what do they see when they get there? Do they see other people trust you? Do they understand the practice areas that you serve? Do they see familiar logos and badges they know? Do they see a law firm being featured in publications? Is there social proof? Are there reviews? 

How does someone sample what your law firms expertise? If you’re the small business law firm, that might be getting a free consultation. But how exactly do they go about getting that consultation? Is it a form on your website, or do they need to call or email you? How quickly do you respond? Is the response personalized, or does it feel like a boilerplate offer? These elements all become a part of the client’s experience and journey with your law firm.

The purchase, and refer stages are more internal. How do you onboard a new client? What are your team’s checks to ensure that clients are getting the results that they want from your law firm? What makes a great experience that will bring them back for another purchase or encourage them to refer a friend? This is where you want to get into the buyer’s head to determine what they’ll expect out of you.

Once you understand what a client wants from you at each stage in the journey, you need to make sure that your online assets address those needs.

Make Content a Relationship-Building Workhorse

The last stage in creating a small law firm marketing plan is content. Clients don’t need a description of your service initially. Sure, once their experience with your law firm deepens and they begin considering their legal options, they’ll want to know the details. But for now, they want to see how they can build a relationship with your law firm.

Back to the small business law firm example: If the prospect is looking to hire an attorney for a business matter, they may not have decided if that’s the best option for them. They may initially just be looking for advice and expertise, thinking there is a workaround that they could choose.

The small business law firm, then, wants to establish themselves as that source of expert advice. This is where educational blogs and web pages come in. The small business law firm will publish “The Ultimate Guide To Avoiding Litigation For Business Matters” — a webpage page that consolidates all of their content around avoiding litigation into one place.

Now, you become their go-to source for guidance on small business law. The educational content pages are a way to draw people in who might not even be looking to hire an attorney or become a client. But then, your expertise is what builds a relationship, trust and eventually convinces them that they do need the services you offer.

Treat content as a branding tactic, not a marketing tactic. Content is how to get people to know,

like, and trust your brand. Marketing your law firm with content is how the modern buyer comes to know, like, and trust you. In other words, it’s the new branding.

Content is not just blog posts. Your emails, videos, case studies, referral events, what you do and say when networking; it is all content. And content needs to be focused on guiding people through each of the stages of your buying journey. Content is a tremendous lever to help you guide people through the stages. 

Landing pages, blog posts, core web pages, free tools, reviews. These are the types of content that people are going to consume when they're doing initial research and getting to know your law firm. 

As a small law firm, you need to consider every piece of your content that you're thinking about producing and make sure it focuses on a stage of your buying journey - Awareness, Education, Sample, Purchase and Refer. Your content will give a voice to your small law firm marketing plan. Your content will be useful instead of just another task. 

Contact Your Marketing Consultant at Indispensable Marketing

If you’re a principal or managing partner that needs help with creating a small law firm marketing plan or your law firm’s online presence on Google and other search engines, at Indispensable Marketing we can help. We offer marketing strategy plan consulting, marketing audits, monthly marketing packages, consultations, exploratory calls or monthly local SEO services. Contact us for more information.