"You can’t market Private Client Law", Or can you?

By  Douglas McPherson, 

Douglas is Director at Size 10 ½ Boots, a business development agency that works solely with professional service firms.Tenandahalf help their clients grow by winning more new clients and by generating higher fees from their existing clients. Due to their innovative methods, the marketing of private client services is now an area in which Tenandahalf lead the market.

“You can’t market private client law!” Does that sound familiar? At Size 10 1/2 Boots, we’ve spent the last 7 years helping law firms with business development and we tend to hear it a lot. In fact, it’s a statement we hear almost as much as it’s one we disagree with. 

While private client law can’t be marketed in the same way as commercial or more specialist lines, it can still be marketed. In fact, it can actually be marketed more effectively and in more innovative ways than its corporate counterpart.

The legal landscape is changing; this is no longer news but fact. Competition between firms – most notably on a regional basis – is increasing daily and commercial entities from outside the sector are threatening to encroach on a variety of the more transactional service lines. Firms will now need to adopt a more progressive approach to marketing services, especially since individuals are now finding it increasingly difficult to recognise their need for these services and distinguish between different providers.

Over my next few blog posts, I'll be sharing techniques we’ve employed to help private client practices market their services effectively. All our strategies have been formulated on the basis of our experiences working with law firms up and down the country. Some of the methods I'll include are working practices we’ve been introduced to and helped to refine, others are strategies and activities we’ve designed for our clients as part of specific BD (business development) projects. The common denominator is, we know they work.

One point I’d like to stress is that no marketing tactic works in isolation and no marketing tactic works immediately. 

Successful marketing of private client services requires a variety of activities delivered not as random acts of heroic love when time or opportunity presents itself, but as a measured campaign built around a single consistent key message. As in any walk of (commercial) life, that message needs to be clearly thought out because it’s your message that will ultimately not only attract, educate and convert your prospective clients but also set you apart from your competitors …

To find out more about how to do this, stay tuned for my next post.

 

Comments

[Legal marketing]

Also heard this comment loads, just like the comment that "no one instructs solicitors via google searches". This is also completely incorrect. Law firms need to get active and take control of their own destiny !