Suffice it to say Rain BDM has decades of collective experience helping lawyers and law firms create effective legal marketing and business development plans. To ensure you achieve your 2024 goals, here are a few areas we find helpful when developing and implementing successful plans:
Market Research and Analysis.
Do you know your clients’ industries intimately? Do you understand what keeps your clients and prospects awake at night with worry? Are there any trends your clients need to be aware of as they plan for their business’s success in the coming year?
Further, you should be “in the know” about current legal market trends. Is there a demand for specific legal services you or your firm provides? Is a certain practice area going to be particularly profitable? What about a practice that won’t be terribly successful this year? Understanding the big-picture competitive legal landscape is clutch as you hone your target audiences and their needs.
Goals and Objectives.
What will you try to accomplish next year? Define clear, succinct, and measurable objectives for your legal marketing and business development efforts. For example, don’t just note that you want to increase revenue or expand your client base. Identify specifically how you want to increase revenue by 5% or gain 10 new clients next year. Having a goal to increase your firm’s visibility and brand awareness is nice, but it is not an actionable goal. Make sure your targets are verbs, not “it sure would be nice if …” hopes and ideas.
Content Marketing.
Content strategies must work hand in hand with editorial calendars. Create a content strategy that includes blog posts, articles, videos, and webinars to showcase your expertise, and link it to a well-thought-out editorial calendar. Prioritize high-quality, informative, and engaging content that not only addresses the needs of your clients and prospective clients but ensures the content is both relevant and timely. Just as we know holiday shopping ads begin assaulting our sensibilities in October (or earlier), we know our education industry clients are looking for targeted content with helpful “back to school” news they can use from reliable sources.
Social Media Is Here to Stay.
You don’t have to spend a lot of money here, but you do need to invest some time to ensure your social media strategy works for you. Your social media strategy must be aligned and woven into your content strategy. The ultimate goal is to seamlessly connect with your clients and prospective clients on the social platforms they use regularly. You can continue building upon these relationships by sharing relevant content that will engage your audience and showcase your expertise. Keep in mind that video content usually blows static content out of the water in digital analytics. Why not include a video strategy for your firm?
Client Feedback Program.
If you don’t have a formalized client feedback program, it’s time to implement one. The benefits of using a tool (or tools) to gather actionable feedback from clients are critical in so many ways. Investing the time to truly understand the client’s experience will pay big dividends. Doing top-notch legal work is often table stakes these days. What is the client experience folks have when interacting with you and your firm? Attorneys, receptionists, paralegals, the billing staff and more – all of these touchpoints make up the full client experience. You can easily understand what it’s like to work with your firm – and develop deeper relationships with your clients – when you have a formal client feedback program. Knowing how clients experience your firm is critically important to your future success and growth.
Budget and Resource Allocation.
Budget might feel like a dirty word, but I promise it’s not. Knowing the resources to allocate to certain projects helps take unnecessary stress out of the equation. Assign a budget for marketing and business development activities and track the return on investment of each initiative.
