Posting will be sporadic at best this week, as I’m trying to launch a new site, while at the same time trying to find a new place to live. With that said, I had a thought this morning that really made me question some of my assumptions about
Many times legal marketing initiatives start from the middle. Someone decides “We should update our brochure and make it more client-focused.” Rather than starting from a problem (we want more clients), this approach already takes for granted that redoing the brochure is the correct path. It’s coming up with a solution for a problem that isn’t clearly defined.
That made me think about something very basic: why do law firms need marketing?
The most obvious answer would be: to get more clients. Right? Makes sense to me.
Why? Why do law firms want more clients?
How would you answer that? Is the answer “so we can make more money?”
So now we’re shifting problems. The problem isn’t “We need more clients.” Instead, it’s “we want more money.” Those are two very different problems.
If all you wanted was to get more clients, you could lower your rates considerably. You could offer to do some work for free. If the only goal is to get more clients, there are many ways to accomplish this. However, most firms aren’t willing to get clients at any cost. Put simply, that wouldn’t make a lot of sense.
Most firms want to make more money.
So what’s my point here?
Many law firms see marketing as an “activity” that needs to be done. But they don’t “do it” with the ultimate goal in mind. How is a brochure going to make a law firm more money? It’s not. It might help someone that is on the fence become more aware of the firm, and because of that, they might eventually become a client. But, you see, the brochure isn’t helping the “we want to make more money” problem. Rather, it’s a good way to attack the “We have some people that could potentially be clients, but they really don’t know much about what they do, and if we can just give them a glossy bunch of text and pictures, they might eventually become clients, but right now we don’t have that” problem.
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