When it comes to legal marketing, good is good enough!
One of the biggest lessons that I have carried with me from my days as a practising solicitor is a quote from a legal judgment that was constantly repeated by a partner in one of my firms. Whilst I confess to finding its overuse a little annoying at times, now that I run my own businesses I fully understand the importance of this statement. In the last five years of running my marketing consultancy for solicitors, I am frequently reminded of the statement as I can see Solicitors living out the statement to the detriment of their marketing activities and their business as a whole.
If something is nearly there, if it is good enough, put it out there and get it working for you.
We are all so pressed for time, and whilst you may think that more time will open up tomorrow or next week to allow you to complete a project and to make it perfect, the truth of the matter is that if at anytime that does happen, something else will fill the time left and prevent you from finishing what you have started.
In marketing terms, where I most see this statement poisoning solicitors marketing is in the following places:
Websites
Often a website is ready to be published and to generate new business for a firm of solicitors, only for it to be awaiting final “tweaking” by one, two or three of the partners involved in the process. I have seen this final tweaking process take several months and in some cases over a year.
Everyday that the website was not allowed to go live loses the opportunity to acquire new business. Either the website is replacing an existing poor quality website, or it is a new website for a firm without one. Either way, a good website live, published, and attracting visitors on the website, even with some mistakes, is far better than a ‘perfect’ website on your web design company’s server.
Perfect is the enemy of good, so publish the website!
Advertisements
When a new advertisement is drafted to replace an existing poor one, again it is the final approval that can take weeks or even months. Do not wait, publish the new advertisement and amend it and change it as you notice where you can make improvements.
Brochures
When the brochures are nearly ready, when all they require is a final sign off, make the final sign off on the day that you receive the artwork. Once you have the brochures, display them and send them to clients. Do not leave them sitting under reception because one of the partners does not think that they are perfect (does not like the colour or the images used). Send them out and get some new business in.
Direct Mail Or Email Campaigns
This is one of the classic examples where something not being quite perfect can be absolutely terminal to an otherwise good marketing campaign. You prepare a campaign and post or email your newsletter or direct mail campaign to your database. 99% of the people that receive it have no problem with it, some act upon it and ask you to carry out some work for them, excellent. However, one person out of the 1,000 that received it has moved, or worse still has since passed away. Their son or daughter calls you and as you handled the probate is not surprisingly angry that you have sent a mail shot to their deceased parent. What do you do?
This is a real life example from a law firm. What did they do? Well this is all about “Perfect is the enemy of good” so there was and is always going to be an error or two on a database, but sending the mailshot out was good. So surely you amend the database so that the mistake does not happen again and the problem is solved?
Not in this case, the senior partner decides never to send a mail shot to any client ever again. This one mistake (the database not being perfect) stops everything. If this had been my firm or my campaign, I would simply have amended the database and then sent flowers, made a personal visit or both and expressed my deepest regret to the children of the deceased. That would seem the appropriate thing to me to do. Most people would accept the apology and the other 999 clients would continue to receive your important mailshots and newsletters which would continue to generate new business for you.
Never Let Perfect Legal Marketing Stop The Good Legal Marketing
Perfect is the enemy of good. You will make mistakes sometimes, but if you do nothing, always waiting for perfection, the major problem is likely to be that your practice goes out of business.
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