A Solid Marketing Plan is Crucial to Your Firm's Growth May 2010
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A Solid Marketing Plan is Crucial to Your Firm's Growth
A business plan and a marketing plan are essentially the same. I prefer to use the term "marketing plan" because a good business plan focuses 75 percent on marketing your service; therefore, I like to emphasize that aspect of it by referring to it as a "marketing plan."
Another reason why I prefer to use the term "marketing plan" is because the term "business plan" is so overused and it sounds so boring. I think a lot of attorneys perceive a business plan as some worthless binder collecting dust on their shelf. I look at a marketing program as a flexible, research-based, real-world driven, living, breathing, ever-changing exercise that is the heart of everything you do on a daily and monthly basis. It is your guide to success!
What does having a marketing plan really do for you and your business? Let me give you a few of the major reasons why you need solid law firm marketing plans:
1. A Marketing Plan Increases Your Chances of Long-Term Business Success - A solid, well thought-out plan keeps you from making serious mistakes later that can quickly sink your practice.
2. It Gives You Structure in an Otherwise Unstructured Business - One of the major reasons why people start a new law firm is to achieve a sense of independence and freedom-taking charge of your own destiny, setting your own schedule, and not having any one tell you what to do.
This can be a great feeling, especially when you know exactly what to do every day, month in and month out, year after year, or if you already have so much business you can't keep up. On the other hand, many business owners are so overwhelmed with the daily activities that they don't take time to think strategically about how to grow their business.
If this is your first try at building a business and you need
direction in small law firm marketing; if your business is relatively
new or if you're struggling to find new clients, you need to create a
solid, well thought-out marketing plan. These plans may include a law
firm marketing consultant that offers legal marketing services.
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 3.
A Marketing Plan Can Keep You on the Right Track- When marketing
your law firm one of the best reasons to develop a marketing plan is to
help you stay on the right track. It is so easy to become distracted
by - problems that arise, new opportunities that sound great but don't
exactly fit with your long-term goals or the daily grind at the office.
A
marketing plan is designed to provide you with freedom within defined
boundaries, the "boundaries" being your short term goals (three to six
months) and long-term goals (one to three years) and reaching financial
independence.
4. A Marketing Plan Will Help You Count the Cost of
Creating Before You Start Building - Critical to any marketing
plan is an outline of your anticipated expenses, your marketing budget,
your sales goals, and a clear path to profitability. Knowing your
financial costs and risks ahead of time can be invaluable in planning
out your growth strategy and managing your budget.
5. It Can Help
You Think Outside the Box - It's very easy to copy someone else's
marketing model, which is what most people end up doing (consciously or
unconsciously) when they don't have an individual law firm marketing
plan.
There are several potential dangers to copying someone else
when it comes to a law firms marketing efforts:
· You miss
opportunities that are perfect for you and not other people due to your
unique experiences, knowledge, background, your location, or surrounding
demographics.
· You may take advantage of "business opportunities"
that are not right for you.
· You may make the same mistakes as the
person you copy. (Note to Self: If you're going to copy someone else,
make darned sure they know what they are talking about and you can
independently verify their claims of success).
6. It Helps You
Create a Vision for What You Want in the Future - Where do you
want to be in 12 months? How about three to five years? Ultimately, your
business will be driven by your vision and the process of developing
that vision is critical to your long-term success. The real value of law
firm marketing plans is all the time,
energy, and research you put into thinking about your business in a
strategic way and then implementing those plans.
7. A Marketing
Plan Sets Up Measurable Objectives for You to Evaluate Your Success - How
will you know if you've had a successful year? Will it depend on how
you feel or can you set up measurable objectives to compare your results
against? If you fail to set measurable standards in your law firm
marketing, how will you know whether or not your specific efforts were
rewarded? How will you determine where to put your future efforts and
your marketing dollars if you don't know if a given idea worked?
A
marketing plan with objective goals can help you ask and answer the
right questions when it comes to evaluating your marketing and sales
efforts. The answers give you indications as to your next steps.
8.
A Marketing Plan Sets You Apart as Being Committed to Your Business - Let's
face it, if you're not willing to spend a few days writing up a solid
marketing plan to grow and develop your business, why should anyone take
your business plans and ideas seriously? Do you really have something
more important to do than taking some time and writing down your plan
for how you are going to succeed in your business?
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 Upcoming Events
 The Rainmaker Retreat is where we teach lawyers how they can have it all; increasing the number of clients they have, doubling their income, and yet work less.
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Discount pricing available for multiple attendees from the same firm.
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