There’s little doubt that when it comes to marketing, few industries have been as active in the last month as the legal profession. And to my professional eye, most of this activity has been focused on the acquisition of new clients. Unfortunately, as far as I can see, a lot of these activities have not delivered their intended business results. I believe the reasons are fairly clear. That is why I have put together some strategic insights that will help law firms and individual practitioners to rethink their Covid-19 marketing strategy for attracting new clients. I hope the following suggestions will inspire new ideas and approaches:
1. It’s the strategy and not the action that delivers results. A popular way to attract new clients in the current climate is through webinars. This is essentially a good way to attract new potential customers to your services. However, have you considered how you will convert your webinar’s audience into actual clients? What will be your second, third, and fourth steps? Have you prepared an entire customer journey before launching a webinar? This is an essential consideration that will help you to increase your conversion rates. And this applies not only to webinars, your customer journey can start with a LinkedIn add, media article or even a radio interview.
2. Optimize your content and use all the channels at your disposal to save your time. Once you have identified the topic that you are going to cover, don’t limit yourself to sharing it in one format only. Think about how you can adapt that content to other channels. You could maybe turn it into a personal email to someone, a live broadcast on social media, or an article for local media or blog on your website, etc. To increase your marketing reach, you can explore advertising opportunities, which makes sense especially now, when advertising price rates are going down.
Social media advertising is a relatively simple and effective place to start. For example, with the investment of approximately 200 euros on promoting a post you can go a long way and put it in front of the eyes of 10K targeted decision makers on LinkedIn.
It’s important to note here that you shouldn’t play around with the content form too much. As I mentioned earlier, the most important consideration here is to understand at what stage of the customer journey this content will be used in. You need to always ask yourself the question, “What do I want this piece of content to achieve?” For example, is it just to hook interest, or is intended to provide a more concrete value for the customer, or to keep an existing customer loyal to your services?
3. The visual quality of the content is important. When it comes to information, law firms tend to be particularly strong; this is, after all, the essence of their craft. Where the cracks start to show, however, is on the visual front. The truth is that the leading law firms in these circumstances put an extra effort into design and visual solutions to have the right finishing touch to the content. That is why currently having a poor or bland aesthetic will impede the potential reach of your content and will lag you behind in the market.
4. Packaged solutions will help you to sell and make faster decisions for your customers. In today’s uncertain climate Business Executives need quickly to decide whom to delegate their legal tasks. This is where being able to offer packaged solutions will give you a competitive advantage. The Choice of 3 strategy is particularly suited to this case as each of three provided options have a clearly defined scope of work, fixed price and project timeline.
I would like to emphasize that this strategy is most useful when it comes to attracting and onboarding new clients. You will find that once your new client is on board, you’ll need to customize your services to fit their exact needs.
5. Well, and now a little extra for the smaller players in the market. If you haven’t formed a reputation in the market as experts in all fields so far, now it is definitely not the right time to start. This is the time, instead to concentrate on the industry sector (e.g., accommodation, catering, medical, industrial, retail, etc.) or practice areas (e.g. employment law, insolvency, data protection, etc.) where you are the strongest and focus all your marketing efforts on this. If your goal is to attract new customers –this will be your best option. That is my guarantee.
Of course, I have put this together with the understanding that you are already taking care of your existing clients and providing them with all the information they need. After all, they are the most important clients for you right now and the greatest business potential comes from them.
Neringa Petrauskaite is a business development and marketing strategist with 15 years of international legal service industry experience working both in-house and as a outsourced consultant.