What is Marketing?

Law firms are full of wonderful people that haven’t got a clue what their ‘marketing’ department does.  It is that enigma that sits away and messes with websites and things like that, I’m speaking from experience of getting questions all the time about what I actually did all day.

Well, that enigma is one of the reasons that work comes in through the door, they are the promotions department for the firm and they are busier than ever with the growth of social media amongst other things.

My first job in law was as a marketing assistant in a law firm in Sheffield over 20 years ago back in 2002 a full two years before Facebook was even invented.  Marketing back then was a hell of a lot easier, posting a few adverts in paper magazines, running a few events, making sure we had a website that was live and spending fortunes on Legal 500 (that one hasn’t changed).

So in my words what is marketing and how did I explain it to my firms?

Marketing in its simplest form is just the generation of new enquiries coming to your law firm, that’s it pretty basic isn’t it.

It gets a bit more complicated further on, you’ll hear phrases like below the line, offline/online, bounce rate, content marketing and lots of other wonderfully made-up buzz words (like buzz words) that I’ll explain in further newsletters.

I’m also a very big believer that every member of your law firm has to get involved in marketing, you have to believe in your firm and you have to help your marketing team.  Simply telling people where you work and why you love it there is marketing, this helps to promote your firm, but how could you go further?

For me, please disagree in the comments if you want, modern marketing is all about building communities. Why, because communities are generally loyal, that is what a brand is, it is just a big community of like-minded loyal people.  Look at my #Fridaydebate posts on Linkedin, they form communities of ‘this’ or ‘that’, the latest one was McDonald’s or Burger King.

So in just the simplest terms - marketing is building communities of loyal fans through promotion and client service.

I’ll cover client service and client journeys in later posts, I just wanted to get started with my basic viewpoint of what marketing is.

I’ll include an action in every newsletter I send, something for you to consider or do:

ACTION:

• See if you can find all the places where your firm is marketing, social media accounts, and communities they’re involved with.

• What can you do to help your marketing team, what actions will help, a quick clue is consistency is more successful.

• What is your marketing team doing to involve everyone in the firm?

Happy growing

See you next week

Chris