Starting your own personal injury law firm can be a daunting task especially if you are an attorney with no business background. Many marketing agencies will offer you a myriad of marketing tactics, some of them good agencies, but quite a lot will provide you with goofball ideas, diving right away into specifics without looking at the big strategic picture. Don’t leave the success of your business to chance and follow what everybody else does. If you do, you’ll probably get the same results as them, which is not much.
Just like any business, developing a Marketing Plan is crucial for your Personal Injury Law firm. It guides your revenue generation. Your firm’s marketing activities will become straightforward, calculated, and strategic, based on your vision. Without a plan, you will be directed primarily by emotion and your level of risk-tolerance or only by what is an industry norm (which could make you spend lots of money without getting any results). Without a Marketing Plan, there is no way you can track your progress and see where your business is heading.
Another reason you need a marketing plan is to remind yourself that doing marketing should be multifaceted, multi-step, multi-channel, and multi-media, which allows you to have a conversation with the customer no matter where they are online or offline. You should be able to meet them where they are at, starting from the awareness stage and leading all the way through to the close of a sale. That entire marketing funnel or the prospect funnel engages someone from the level of initial awareness about their problem whether they even realize they have a problem or not.
When you start your process with tactics, or specific ideas, or with your content, you have all of these different aspects, and it’s difficult to pull it all together without a plan that starts with the overall strategy and how the pieces all fit together.
Questions You Need to Know Before Creating a Marketing Plan
1.) What is your overall objective (how much do you want to move the needle)?
2.) What is your brand?
3.) What is your unique selling proposition?
4.) What are your remarkable differences?
5.) What are the different areas that you might be able to influence your business with marketing in a way that doesn’t just do what everyone else in the legal field is doing?
6.) What is your process for lead generation—online and offline?
The marketing should be multi-step, multi-media, multi-platform and it should all be integrated because you are not marketing to a computer screen and you are not marketing to a magazine. You are having a conversation with real people. On the other end of that computer screen is a human being and to build a relationship with that person, you need to be nimble enough to engage them from as many different angles as possible and keep your value proposition in front of them repeatedly with as high a frequency as possible. When they’re ready to engage with you, you are there at that time. Well, that takes a lot of thought and effort and sometimes money.
Now there are ways to make it cheaper, and there are ways to end up spending more money. The way to make it more affordable is by having a Marketing Plan and Strategy and thinking it through.
Here are a couple of different modalities you are likely familiar with to reach a customer with your value proposition, brand, image and integrate those messages into a campaign selling your value proposition:
1.) TV or Radio
2.) In-Market Targeting Platform to find leads as they search the internet, using inexpensive Pay Per Click
3.) Social Media
4.) SEO
So which one do you use? How can you use them all? It all starts with making a plan and a schedule where you intentionally integrate these efforts.
Having a marketing plan is essential. You can start with a simple outline which talks about your goals and objectives, budget, and platforms you want to test, along with how you’re going to go about making that work for you. It’s not as hard as it sounds. You can start small, and you can write a little bit of it at a time, but I highly recommend that you get some help with it and you can devote your time to your cases at hand.
There is no question about the importance of planning for your Personal Injury Law Firm. If you want your business to have direction and reach your goals, contact me at Stoddard Agency, and we can get started today.
