We are big believers in the “rule of 3”, keeping things simple and in focus. Keep an eye out for the next two installments of this series in the next week. If you take these steps to heart, you will be on your way to creating and executing a marketing plan and you will have taken 3 positive marketing actions which will benefit the firm over the course of 2017.
- Check your website: Ensure it is:
- Mobile friendly, meaning
- you can access the majority of the data on the site in a readable format without resizing and moving each page, but simply scrolling down as you read; and
- the telephone numbers and email addresses are live links;
- Current, meaning it accurately reflects your team, practices and the photos are not a much younger you; and
- Concise, with limited exception, most law firm websites today are not workflow, or data driven, but simply only function as an online brochure, rolodex and an archive for your thought leadership/marketing communications.
- Mobile friendly, meaning
- Gather/Update your contacts: This is the perfect time of year to focus on contacts as the majority of the firms have done some form of holiday season outreach. Do 3 things with these contacts:
- Be very conclusive in gathering these contacts. Capture “what” they are if possible (prospects, clients, referral sources, other lawyers, etc.);
- Track the attorney/practice area they came from. In a multi-practice law firm, this will provide an indication of interest for segmentation purposes (we will get to that in the last series); and
- Consolidate them into a single database. Most firms have at a minimum someone who knows Microsoft Excel, or some even have a marketing database tool. Consolidating the contacts will allow you to more easily keep the contacts clean and free of duplicates.
- Brainstorm thought leadership/article topics: Guess what there are three reasons to do this (smile…): Once you have created a list of potential topics that your readership constituency will potentially enjoy and most importantly you have the capability of writing, you will be able to:
- Develop your frequency of outreach based on the number of topics;
- Develop a natural timeline and sequence of article distribution. Some may benefit a certain time of year, or work better as an informative series; and
- Assign your authors and dates for content creation. Notice we said nothing about writing at the outset of this topic. This process essentially delivers a project plan and timeline that is hard to refute, enabling buy-in form the authors in the process.
We are also big believers in being there to help you succeed in getting these positive actions underway. It is why we are in business!
Do not hesitate to reach out should you need help along the way.
The ProfessionalWORX Team