As the number of individuals filing for bankruptcy continues to fall, the bankruptcy law market grows more competitive. Bankruptcy law firms and attorneys need to be strategic to capture and retain clients in the shrinking market. Creating and implementing a bankruptcy law marketing strategy ensures firms and attorneys have a big-picture approach to consistently reach the right audience, with the right information, to develop and keep business.
What is a Bankruptcy Law Marketing Strategy?
For bankruptcy law firms and attorneys, a marketing strategy is an over-arching, structured, and detailed guide regarding goals, target markets, differentiators, budgets, and more. The marketing strategy ties marketing efforts to defined business objectives and keeps the entire team focused on specific business goals.
A bankruptcy law marketing strategy, like most legal or business marketing strategies, often begins with identifying and describing the four Ps:
- Product (or Service): What is it called? Who needs it? Why?
- Price: What do you charge for the service? What do competitors charge?
- Promotion: Where and how do you promote the service? This could include advertising, public relations campaigns, digital marketing strategies including SEO, videos, and more.
- Place: Where is this service available? Is it offered in person only or do you provide virtual services, for example?
Knowing this information provides the foundation for creating a bankruptcy law marketing strategy.
It should be noted how a bankruptcy law marketing strategy is different than a marketing plan. The plan is developed based on the strategy. It includes the specific tactics to implement the strategy and reach its goals. A plan usually has a timeline and details. For example, the plan names the publications or platforms to advertise with and for how long, along with the actual content, including words and images, to use. Smaller bankruptcy law campaigns also flow from the strategy.
The Seven Parts of a Bankruptcy Law Marketing Strategy
Goals
Business development is likely the ultimate goal of a bankruptcy law marketing strategy, but the strategy can also include more specific or short-term goals. For example, setting a goal for a target number of new leads or clients in a certain time frame. Goals can also be set on such things as increasing newsletter subscriptions or boosting visibility through public relations and thought leadership. Outlining goals first informs the other pieces of the strategy and provides a way to track both success and opportunities for improvement.
Service
This is the product or products that are being marketed. A bankruptcy law marketing strategy may include the whole of the practice or be segmented to focus on sub-practices, such as representing individuals in Chapter 7 filings or debt restructuring for small businesses.
Competitive Analysis
How do competing bankruptcy law firms and lawyers market the same service or services? What is their reputation in the community? What makes their service unique? A competitive analysis involves evaluating competing bankruptcy law firms and lawyers and comparing/contrasting those findings against your services, marketing activities, and differentiators. This post about competitive analysis for criminal lawyers offers many great tips that bankruptcy lawyers can utilize, too.
Target Market
The client who needs the service is the target market, so it is important to know who they are and where and how to communicate with them. Create a “persona” for the client by reviewing current and past clients of that service and listing characteristics like age, gender, profession, income level, location, etc. The firm’s website analytics or social media insights can also reveal who is interested in the service. Review competitors’ social media profiles and cases to see who their clients and interested audiences are.
Value Proposition
A value proposition is a concise explanation of what differentiates this service from its competitors. It can focus on anything from the unique talents and backgrounds of the lawyers providing the service to a string of hard-fought or high-profile great client outcomes. Learn more in The Importance of Value Propositions in Bankruptcy Law Marketing.
Messaging
Begin with an elevator speech that incorporates the value proposition and is geared toward the target audience, using words they can understand and clearly showing how the service can help them. Be consistent with this message in all content, from blogs and videos to website descriptions and social media.
Budget
How and where the service is promoted will depend largely on the budget. While there are plenty of “free” channels available, such as the law firm’s own blog and social media profiles, there will still be costs involved. These include the time it takes to research and draft content, create and implement an SEO strategy, and manage the online platforms. Paid channels, like pay-per-click or newspaper advertisements, will require additional expenditure. The budget will set the strategy’s parameters.
Turning the Bankruptcy Law Marketing Strategy into a Plan
Once the strategy is complete, the bankruptcy law marketing plan can be created. This is where the details of what will be done to promote the firm and its service(s) are fleshed out. A plan includes the channels that will be used to reach the target market. For example, if the target audience is small, local business owners in the retail, entertainment, and food industries, you would want to research what social media channels are used by that persona and focus your content and advertising there. No use making Tik Tok videos if business owners are active in the local chambers of commerce’s Facebook group.
The plan should also include assigned roles and timelines, including opportunities to measure the plan’s effectiveness along the way and adjust as needed.
A bankruptcy law marketing strategy ensures that resources spent on marketing make sense for the service and, importantly, provide a good ROI. Contact Scorpion to get your bankruptcy law marketing strategy started.
