This is a statement I often hear from solicitors who are running a practice or a team. How do I find the time to market my business? Well, the very simple and stark answer is that nowadays you absolutely MUST find the time to market your legal services. The legal world has changed, it is far more competitive than it ever has been, and what’s more it is only going to get more and more so with new entrants steaming into the legal services market place. As I often say, if you keep doing what you have always done you will no longer get the same results, you will now see rapidly diminishing results.
If you have never consistently found time for marketing you will have seen your business go through the ‘peaks and troughs’ model repeatedly. One month you might be too busy to do any marketing so you concentrate on servicing your existing clients, but then you find the next month because you have not been doing any marketing and do not have any systems in place you suddenly do not have enough work. I can see you nodding your head right now.
The trouble with this is that it is a horrible way to run a business. It leaves you sometimes awake at night wandering how you are going to pay the overheads next month with no work coming in. It leaves you struggling to think of new methods of generating new client instructions. It also leaves you completely open to those snake oil salesmen selling you this super new-fangled method of marketing that is only available for one firm of solicitors in your town but if you don’t buy it now it will go to your nearest competitor (oh, and the price is nearly always around £1,000 and THESE THINGS NEVER PRODUCE A RETURN ON INVESTMENT).
You see I know all of these things because I have been marketing law firms for over 21 years now and I understand all of the challenges and frustrations faced by you.
However, you can make your life an awful lot more straightforward, enjoyable and less stressful. The answer is to put in place systems which automate your marketing processes. This absolutely means that you must have a marketing database, but don’t panic, there is simple software that makes this really, really easy for you. It also means that you must use ‘marketing leverage’ repeatedly and relentlessly too, so that whenever you undertake any marketing activity you use the materials or information created as many times as possible to provide you with the maximum chances of success for your efforts.
The legal services world has changed and you must change with it, or you will face serious problems, but you do not have to. Here is a comment I received from a solicitor recently who has been taking my advice and following the systems I have prepared for my Marketing4Solicitors members:
“Early in the year I spent a large number of hours putting together a website following as closely as possible your recommendations. Since it went live in March I’ve produced an average of about £1,000 per week of new business directly from Google Adwords which for a sole practitioner is an enourmous boost for my turnover.
I’m being cautious at the moment but if the current rate of new instructions is maintained over the next few months then I’ll look to expand to enable me to devote more time to strategic work which I so enjoy doing.
Even though I’ve only applied some of your recommendations (so far), I’ve already seen dramatic results. Thank you for all your guidance.”
Commercial Solicitor
You need to find time to market your system, but you can be clever with your time and put in place automatic systems to bring you new leads every single month, not just on a one off basis. If you do this, as Louis Armstrong once sang, You will have all the time in the world …. well, almost.
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