How Well Do the Usual Suspects of Marketing Practices Work for Law Firms

Whether your small business provides legal representation or any other kind of product or service, you do not have to reinvent the wheel to run a successful marketing campaign. Making people notice that your law firm (or any other kind of business) exists and making them want to contact you when they need or want the service that your business provides does not require you to drop tens of thousands of dollars on elaborate stunts to make you seem more prestigious than your competitors. Earlier this month, an article appeared on the USA Today website extolling the virtues of “tried and true” marketing tactics. The trouble is that what is good for the neighborhood burger joint or auto body shop is not always good for the small law firm. When it comes to law firm marketing, you need a law firm website with a steady stream of legal blog content, as well as some of the usual suspects of small business marketing.

Keeping It Simple: What Works

Some of the tried-and-true small business marketing tactics that Rhonda Abrams recommends work well for law firms. These are some of her suggestions that small law firms would be wise to apply:

· Posting signs – A sign outside your physical office location, identifying what you do. Even in a pandemic, people have their usual driving routes. People will remember, when they need you, that there is a place called “Bloggins and Associates Personal Injury Law” on Main Street near the nail salon and the H&R Block.

· Business cards – Business networking in person is always effective, even when it is separated by long stretches of working from home. A good fraction of the people to whom you hand business cards at professional networking events will contact you.

· Search engine ads – You are wise to put effort into trying to rank at the top of the organic search results on Google, but it doesn’t hurt to have your website show up among the paid search results, too.

“Universally Foolproof” Advertising Techniques That Don’t Work for Law Firms

Abrams makes it sound like the recommended tried and true marketing practices will work equally well for all kinds of small businesses, but some of them simply are not applicable to small law firms. Coupons and discount promotions don’t work for law firms; a “Divorce Monday special” is just tacky. Likewise, it is impossible for law firms to give out free samples, free initial consultations notwithstanding. Finally, branded swag is not becoming of law firms, either. Can you imagine how silly it would be if people who had contacted your law firm walked around wearing “Bloggins and Associates” hoodie sweatshirts or played with “Bloggins and Associates” frisbees in the park?

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel With Your Marketing Strategy, but Do Trust the Pros

Getting professionally written content for your law firm website is always a good idea that will generate a good return on investment. The legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will create custom-written blog content that never goes out of style.

Can Brainstorming Content Marketing Ideas for Your Law Firm Be a Group Activity?

Many of today’s lawyers took Advanced Placement English in high school or participated in their schools’ speech and debate programs. The brainstorming exercises you did in those contexts in high school probably seemed silly at the time but turned out to be useful later on. It was no fun to draw a cluster of interconnected balloons (this exercise later came to be called a mind map), or a list of incomplete sentences with multiple layers of subheadings and turn it in for a grade, but you probably do some kind of outlining when you write anything more complex than a one-paragraph email. Brainstorming is beautiful, but brainstorming on command, performative brainstorming, is counterproductive, not to mention painfully embarrassing. There must be some way for lawyers to strategize collaboratively with their colleagues in order to generate ideas for legal blog content for their law firm’s website.

The Less Structure, the Better the Brainstorm

Some industries try to sell the dream of a democratic workplace where employees sit around a whiteboard and write down their unfiltered ideas for marketing strategy using brightly colored markers and responding to each other’s contributions with enthusiasm. This model fails to consider that it is more work to produce an enthusiastic response to every colleague’s every marketing idea than it is simply to write down your thoughts. Meanwhile, it is productive to share ideas.

Of the 13 brainstorming techniques that Darren Dematas of Content Marketing Institute recommends, the two that work best enable the ideas to flow on their own, and one of them even allows employees to share ideas on their own terms. One successful strategy is to schedule brainstorming meetings which are really brainstorm-sharing meetings. Each individual writes down their ideas over a period of weeks before the meeting. At the meeting, the employees discuss their ideas in pairs, each getting feedback from their partner before presenting the results of the pair discussions to the larger group.

In the other scenario, both the writing down of ideas and the responding to them take place asynchronously. The content marketing team creates a Google Doc or similar shared online document. Each person writes ideas on the document as the ideas occur to them. When you open the document to write your ideas, you can also see your colleagues’ ideas and respond to them. When everything takes place at the pace of writing instead of the pace of face-to-face interaction, it is easier to resist the temptation to shoot down each other ideas or to take offense to constructive criticism. You can read people’s responses to your ideas when you are in the frame of mind to receive feedback.

Just Because You Brainstorm, It Doesn’t Mean You Have to Write Blog Posts

Brainstorming marketing content is time-consuming enough; writing it is even more time-consuming. The legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will create high-performing legal blog content based on your brainstorms, or if you prefer, will brainstorm it and write it from scratch.

Finding the Right Content Marketing Strategy Is Tough, but Here Is How You Can Be Resilient About It

The fact that there are so many companies out there trying to sell you a quick fix for content marketing should tell you that there are lots of other people in the same boat as you, trying to find effective ways to spread the message about their businesses. It should also tell you that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Dropping f-bombs on YouTube might work if you are trying to sell a multilevel marketing business opportunity that caters to fitness bros (as opposed to the ones that cater to church ladies), but it doesn’t work for law firms. In fact, not all law firms need the same content marketing strategy. The only way to find the strategy that works for you is trial and error, which takes a lot of resilience. It always helps to post legal blog content on your website on a regular basis, but what you post and how often you post it will have to change over time.

Play the Long Game

According to Gina Balarin of Content Marketing Institute, successful content marketing is a moving target and the key to success is not getting too discouraged by disappointing performance of your content or by criticism of your work. You should think of content marketing as a two-way conversation with your audience. If something gets a good reception, you should continue doing it for as long as the good reception lasts, but don’t get too set in your ways or become sure that you have found the one and only perfect formula for content marketing.

Don’t Rush Into Business Deals With Marketing Firms

Most small law firms do not have the budget to hire a full-time content marketing staff, nor do lawyers and paralegals have a lot of time to devote to creating marketing content. Outsourcing your content marketing is a wise choice, but start small. Start by hiring marketing firms for individual projects of modest size. This way, you will be able to try out the content of several firms before you make a big investment. If you rush into a long-term agreement too soon, you will end up basing your decisions on protecting your business deal and not on getting the best content.

Think of Poor Outcomes as Moving the Search for the Right Strategy Forward

Remember that experimentation is a process, and that in order to find out what works, you must find out through experiencing what doesn’t work. If a piece of content does not perform well, you will know to do something different next time. It is easier to do this when you haven’t already paid a content marketing firm to produce dozens of other pieces of content like it.

Start With Professionally Researched and Professionally Written Legal Blog Content

When looking for content marketing firms, start with one that works exclusively with law firms. The legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will help you find a content marketing strategy that works well for your law firm.