Creating a Winning Law Firm Marketing Plan Template

The Significance of a Marketing Plan

A marketing plan is essential to any business’s growth. This stands true for law firms as well. In fact, more than other types of businesses, law firms need a specific, targeted marketing plan. A lack of direction can be fatal for a firm. An effective plan can make the difference between your firm thriving, reaching its goals for the future, or not being able to keep up with the competition.
A solid marketing plan helps you to make choices that will advance your firm’s interest. You already know that you don’t want to waste time and money on ineffective marketing efforts. A concrete plan helps you better understand how you are reaching your audiences. The right plan also allows you to look at the cost of all of your marketing efforts and evaluate the return on investment. If you use your marketing plan effectively, you can see what is working and what isn’t. In this effort, a marketing plan works as an effective tool for that evaluation . It also brings your entire team into the marketing fold. On top of these benefits, a marketing plan gives you a way to analyze your competition. By doing so, you can not only outpace them but also better serve your current clients and reach new clients.
On the other hand, having no plan or an ineffective one can lead to a serious lack of growth and even stagnation. With no plan in place, lawyers spend money on initiatives and tactics without understanding their effectiveness or purpose. As a result, you are wasting money and time. You become reactive rather than proactive. When you are not proactive, you are at serious risk of being left behind.
A sound marketing plan is the key to success for many law firms. It also keeps you competitive. The best way to create a successful plan is to put it into writing. With a detailed plan of action, you can have a firm foundation on which to grow. You can also avoid the many pitfalls that come with not having any plan at all.

Essential Components of a Law Firm Marketing Plan

Essential Components
Every law firm marketing plan template should be a roadmap to your law firm’s future. In it, you identify the problems and needs of current and prospective clients. You make choices about how to meet them. And you align your actions with those choices.
It’s no wonder that lawyers like templates. They’re familiar, practical, and — if you have the right one — they help you focus on what really matters. When you break down the six essential components of the perfect law firm marketing plan template, here’s what you need to include:
Target audience identification. If you don’t know your buyer persona, you can’t find them. Once you do, you can list potential referral sources and prospects. This stage of planning is about building a relationship map to find, engage, and nurture.
Competitive analysis. Assess your law firm’s competition in terms of their strengths and weaknesses. Translate that into what you’re doing well – and how you can differentiate your firm from the competition.
Marketing strategies. What tactics will help you reach your goals? This could be lead generation strategies like content marketing, email marketing, online marketing, and social media marketing. Strategic relationships and advocacy are methods others may not have considered. So make sure to include what you’re doing right.
Contingency plans. There are no guarantees in life or in law firm marketing. So if one marketing strategy or channel stops producing qualified leads, you need a Plan B that’s ready to go.
Budgeting. Your budget gives you perspective. If you’ve done a good job identifying your law firm’s market and competitive advantages, you’ll find ample opportunities to allocate to your budget. It also gives you a way to objectively prioritize your marketing plan based on the realities of your current capacity.
Performance metrics. If you don’t know how many new clients your law firm acquired last month, this quarter or last year; if you don’t know if your marketing plan is giving you the ROI you need; you’re not alone. But you could be with the right law firm marketing plan.

Establishing Marketing Goals and Objectives

Setting marketing goals and objectives begins with determining what you must achieve this year. You have to start with a clear picture of your yearly business objectives. If you have not already formulated business goals for this year, do not pass go, and do not begin creating your marketing plan until you do. Marketing your firm effectively depends on setting objectives that are aligned with the firm’s broader business goals.
When setting marketing goals, I encourage you to think in terms of desired results. Your results-oriented goals should take your best information into account so that if you reach or exceed them, you will know you have pursued the right strategy.
One approach to ensuring you have set the right objectives is to ask yourself about the specific strategic business goals that your marketing efforts must support. For example, if your strategic business goal is to grow your share of billable work for an existing client, your marketing objective may be to identify and pursue two additional opportunities to grow work in the current year. Your goals and objectives should move the needle toward increasing the share of client’s work that your firm receives.
There are two general categories of objectives, each of which has corresponding information needed for the plan. The first category includes goals for specific practice areas or industry segments/practice niches. If you are not targeting any particular group, then you will primarily need information on revenue targets for the firm, as well as anticipated changes in expenses.
The second category of objectives includes general objectives related to overall business or brand-building. Information needed for those objectives includes projected revenue growth and expenses, expected change in market share, desired increase in client retention, and desired increase in overall engagement level with clients and prospects.
As noted, one of the biggest challenges in developing your marketing plan is that it ultimately must serve your firm’s business development needs. It is important that you involve key decision makers at your firm in determining and establishing the goals and objectives for your marketing plan. When your firm markets its services, it must balance a number of factors — such as its business objectives, the need to invest for the future, the need to take a long-term view, maintaining the trust of clients, maintaining a reputation for quality work, developing intellectual property that can be monetized, and competing on the basis of price.
That is why it is so important that the marketing goals and objectives you set are a reflection of your firm’s business objectives.
Once you have developed marketing objectives for your law firm marketing plan, you will need to clearly state those objectives. They should include: Once your firm has developed measurable objectives you can be certain your plan is aligned with your general business objectives.

Clarifying Your Law Firm’s Unique Selling Proposition

Once you’ve identified your ideal client, you need to think about how you are going to serve them. What is your value proposition? This will help you determine how to position your services in the market. How will you be able to serve your ideal clients effectively and efficiently? What specific needs do you meet for them in exchange for their payment? How will your firm be perceived through these interactions? Ask yourself these questions: What does my ideal client need a lawyer to do? What fears or concerns do they have? Your unique value proposition (UVP) will set you apart from the rest of the firms in your practice area or niche. Your UVP should be: You want to include your value proposition in your website content, profile pages (on directory sites), blog, materials, etc. as well as in your initial communications to prospects. This will not only help your prospects vet you, but it will expedite the process of determining if there is a connection between you and the prospect.

Selecting the Appropriate Marketing Channels

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the multitude of marketing channels today. There’s old-school advertising, including yellow pages, television, newspaper and radio ads. While these traditional mediums are less popular than in decades past, they’re still part of many successful marketing plans. But they’re certainly not the only options.
New digital marketing strategies such as SEO, content marketing, email, social media, blogs, and PPC are becoming increasingly important for law firms and agencies. Digital strategy helps you to not only stay top-of-mind with existing clients, but also to reach potential clients, allowing you to expand your practice quickly and cost-effectively. It’s an important part of creating a cohesive brand message.
When selecting which marketing channels are right for your agency, consider:
Your Target Audience – In order to effectively choose your channels, you need to know your target audience. Do some research to determine exactly who you’re trying to reach with your marketing. For example, if you don’t have a large enough social media following but your target audience lives online , you may want to start there. If you try to put all of your content on every platform, you can end up missing the mark completely.
Insights – Once you’ve decided who you want to reach, take advantage of insights offered by social media platforms. For example, Facebook has robust insights and analytics tools that show you who is currently engaging with your ads so you can focus your ad budget on the most effective audience. Twitter Analytics detail how your tweet is performing, which will guide your future strategy.
Budget – What you can afford should have a direct impact on which marketing channels you choose. Facebook and Instagram ads can be more affordable than traditional radio or TV, even though both platforms can reach large audiences. Do some research to find out which channels require the least investment for maximum return, and allocate your budget accordingly.
Testing – When incorporating a new channel, test it out before committing. Spend a small amount of your budget to run an ad or create a profile and see if it’s effective at reaching the audience you need for success. Then scale up your efforts accordingly.

Allocating Resources for Your Marketing Plan

There are a number of factors to think about when allocating a budget for the various marketing activities in your law firm marketing plan. Ask yourself the following: 1. How much money can you allocate to marketing? What do you feel comfortable spending on a monthly basis? Be sure to figure in resources. If your plan takes into consideration doing training for your staff, your lawyer training and other costs, make sure you determine a budget that includes those items or adjusts the plan accordingly. 2. What will have the most optimal return on investment (ROI) for your firm? Are you investing in a radio campaign versus what you believe will deliver the best ROI you could spend on as far as being visible and where your clients are? 3. Does it make sense to allocate some of your resources into social media or digital marketing? 4. Will there still be costs behind being in the Yellow Pages? 5. Is it still worth your while to do print advertising? Will you do less as you increase more of your budget into other areas? 6. Will you prioritize your spending based on what item could bring you a higher ROI?

Evaluating and Analyzing Success

A critical component of a law firm marketing plan is measuring and analyzing the success of the marketing activities you implement. This will enable you to look at the number of leads generated and the quality of those leads to determine which of your marketing activities are providing the best return on investment (ROI). A key periodic check-in point is to measure how well you are on track to spend your marketing budget as planned. This ensures that you don’t overspend, or spend on activities that aren’t producing results, and not have enough budget left at the end of the fiscal year to fund high-potential opportunities. Once you’ve implemented your law firm marketing plan, you’ll want to capture as much analytical data as possible when it comes to your leads and new business . Review this data on a monthly and yearly basis to ascertain which marketing initiatives are producing the most qualified leads and winning the most new business. In addition to using analytics and metrics for tracking your law firm marketing performance, you can also use them to analyze the ROI of any activity, whether it’s digital or print. You can factor in how much time and other resources were expended on a marketing initiative, in addition to its actual costs, and then look at this in terms of cost per qualified lead, cost per new client, and the value of a client to your firm (i.e., average revenue) as well as the number of referrals they provide.