If you run your own law firm, you’re already well aware: time is money.
As an attorney and owner of your own practice, your time is best spent meeting with clients, arguing your cases in court, and making important business decisions for your firm. If you’re spending considerable time on anything outside of that, you may be wasting perfectly good billable hours.
One significant thing that is robbing many law firms of their productivity and profitability is inefficient marketing.
Don’t get me wrong — effective marketing is essential for the growth of your practice because it gets your firm in front of the right prospective clients and helps differentiate you from your competition. I’m talking specifically about marketing that isn’t planned and executed in a way that makes the most sense for your practice.
One of the most common problems we see is the misconception that “more is better” when it comes to investing in marketing vendors and tools.
Here’s an example of the classic scenario of what typically happens when…
- Too many marketing solutions are brought into the mix
- You decide you need a more professional website for your practice, so you hire a web design firm.
- Once your website is live, you realize you need to improve your search rankings, so you contract with an SEO agency.
- Even with great rankings, your competitors are still getting shown at the top of the search results page with pay-per-click ads, so you decide to hire a PPC company to help with your Google Ads.
- But with more people using social media today, you realize the importance of building your firm’s presence on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. So, you bring on a social media consultant.
- And then there’s your firm’s online reputation, which leads you to purchase an online reputation management tool that allows you to keep track of your reviews, mentions, and online client interactions (such as webchats).
The problem with this approach is that you go from getting marketing help to spending a lot of time managing your help.
Research shows that more than 90% of businesses rely on five or more marketing vendors or tools, with the average number being 12. That’s a lot of vendor relationships to juggle and marketing platforms to log in and out of, which ultimately takes away from the time you could be spending serving your clients.
So, what’s the solution?
An all-in-one solution is more efficient for your firm
When you find one marketing partner and one platform that can do the same job as 5… or 7… 12… etc., three things happen for your firm:
- You save time.
- You save money.
- You get better results.
Here’s how…
Time: You no longer have to keep up with a bunch of different contacts in order to guide your various marketing campaigns. You also don’t have to wear the hat of Marketing Director for your firm, making sure all your vendor’s initiatives align with each other and with your end goal. That’s because you now have one contact helping you run the overall marketing strategy for your firm!
Money: The more time you have to focus on serving clients, the more billable hours you’re able to clock. Furthermore, replacing all your marketing vendors with a single-source solution allows you to streamline many of your marketing costs.
Results: When all your marketing data is housed in a single system (rather than across a number of different platforms), it’s easier to analyze your results from your various digital marketing channels and campaigns so you can truly see what’s working and what’s not. With clearer and more accessible data, you’re able to make smarter marketing decisions, which leads to better outcomes.
To learn more about “multiple vendors vs. one partner discussion, check out this infographic.
