Lean and Mean: Making a Marketing Impact Without Breaking the Bank

by Scott E. Pacheco

Just because we’re in pandemic recovery mode doesn’t mean your law firm’s budget has immediately shot up to pre-pandemic levels. And even if there are plenty of funds, now may not be the time to make huge asks.

Here are several ways legal marketers can make a big splash without spending the big bucks.

Google AdWords and LinkedIn Ads

SEO is king and driving traffic to your site with low maintenance ads is a great way to improve it. For just a few hundred dollars a month, you can get tens of thousands of impressions and dozens, if not hundreds, of clicks—stats many firms would take for any piece of content they put out.

Bolster Your Social Media Efforts

The aforementioned ads aside, social media is free and touches just about everyone. Use free tools such as Hootsuite to improve and streamline your posting processes. Create a social calendar and repurpose content if you need a higher volume of posts.

Shoot Videos In-House

A two- to three-minute clip can cost thousands of dollars from a professional video editing service. And while those types of clips have a place in your marketing efforts, so too do simpler videos shot on a phone or iPad. If the pandemic has taught us one thing about video content, it’s that relevance, timeliness, and utility are usually acceptable in the absence of a high-gloss finish. For the cost of one professional clip, you can purchase do-it-yourself equipment that makes it easy to film your attorneys talking about the latest news in their industry.

Double Down on Cross-Servicing Efforts

This is not a new concept, but one that can prove very challenging. If you work in a full-service firm, one of the easiest ways to boost revenue is to serve existing clients in new ways. Especially coming out of a pandemic, driving business without spending a lot of money is pretty much the gold standard. Host monthly meetings (virtual or in person) highlighting specific practices and create cheat sheets for other practices to help lawyers cross-promote their colleagues when talking to existing clients.

Clean Up Your Contacts

This also is a persistent challenge, but one that takes on even more importance now with the turbulent year we’ve just gone through. Track bounces in your email alerts and see what emails are no longer valid. Assign an assistant or secretary to follow up on those bounces and update as many contacts as possible.

There’s nothing more distracting and / or detrimental to business development and marketing efforts than dirty data. This is much easier if you have a CRM system, but worth doing regardless.

Client Outreach/Client Interviews

Engage with clients to better understand their expectations, get feedback on their experience with your service, and solicit suggestions for improvement—even just to get an additional touchpoint with them, especially coming out of a pandemic when there may have been less communication.

This doesn’t have to cost a lot and can be done efficiently leveraging internal resources. Bringing a client’s voice into strategic decisions can have a hugely positive impact.

By looking for efficiencies, leveraging your resources and getting back to basics, your marketing department can still make an impact without that big-name consultant or expensive software application. n

Scott E. Pacheco is a marketing and communications manager at Lerch, Early & Brewer, Chtd. Learn more at www.lerchearly.com.