5 Sure Fire Ways for your Legsal Marketing to Fail
1. Don’t define what you want marketing to achieve for you
This is the number one pitfall of nearly all campaigns. You are guaranteed to fail if you don’t decide up front what you want the campaign to do for you. Without formulating your critical success factors for the marketing initiative you will never be able to measure success/failure or degrees thereof – everything will be outside your control as you constantly grapple for straws.
Practical tip: : This is guaranteed to happen if you say yes to a speculative call from a newspaper which has some “last minute advertising space” but you must agree to advertise “today” or the firm of solicitors next door to you will be offered the slot. Let them have it!
2. Try to please everyone
By trying to be all things to all people you are fairly likely to appeal to no-one. This is the one area of marketing where less is definitely more. Focus small and own that market, rather than trying to attract every one and having your campaigns so broad and generic that they lose their message and appeal in the process.
Practical tip: : Marketing is about appealing to your target market. If you do not know who you are communicating to, how can you appeal to them?
3. Communicate too little or too much
There is definitely constant conflict on how much to say and when. In a nutshell, short copy is great if you have a lot of services you need communicated in one message. Long copy is best if you have one service and you want to communicate your unique brand offering in a way that takes the reader through a sales process. Even in long copy though, you need to determine no more than three key benefits of your product/service and reinforce these over and over again so that the message comes through clearly. By saying too little you won’t grab the reader and draw them in, by sending too many messages you’ll confuse. The key is to say little, and reinforce often.
Practical tip: : For help drafting advertisements see my article in the newsletter archive on the website here: Solicitors Advertisements.
4. Not understanding your target market
Market research is one of those highly specialised areas that often confuses the practical marketer, but this area will be ignored at your peril. Investing time and resources in getting into the minds of your selected target market will be repaid ten-fold. And, the research does not have to be complicated or outsourced. In-house data-mining, CRM (customer relationship management) data analysis, focus groups with some of your customers; are all cost effective options that will provide valuable insight. If you haven’t done something to understand your customers better in the last 3 months, it’s time to block off an afternoon to invest in your future.
Practical tip: : Take a handful of client files from your drawer. What similarities do your clients have? Are they all of a certain demographic, or is location the key? If you find a trend, you can attract more of the same type of clients by focusing your activities on that group.
5. No time to think – just do
This is the one area that is becoming a chronic sickness in all marketing efforts. By working on fewer campaigns but investing focused time and energy around their effectiveness you will achieve more and do so with less stress and more fun.
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