Here are some things I think about when I think of Mac & Cheese. It’s comfortable, safe, tasty, and full of cheesy goodness. It’s relatively easy to make. It will satisfy a whole room full of people. You can vary it slightly by adding tomatoes, nuts, other veggies or even different kinds of cheese. You can make it from a box, or from scratch.
So many options – but good no matter how you cook it up.
There’s only one downside to mac & cheese – it’s not very good for you. Lots of saturated fat and cholesterol. It has too much sodium. If you eat it everyday, you are pretty much going to guarantee yourself a heart-attack sooner or later.
So what does this have to do with legal marketing?
You don’t want to build a law practice with mac & cheese style legal marketing. There are lots of different strategies you can employ to market your law practice. Many of them are easy to implement, require little work from you (except writing a check), and will satisfy the vast majority of lawyers. They make you feel comfortable and like you are actually marketing your law practice.
Here are some examples of the legal marketing I’m talking about:
- Yellow pages (if you don’t know what you are doing)
- Slapping up a website with no substance or information
- Hiring an “SEO guy” to help you with your google rankings
- Adwords advertising (again, only when you don’t know what you are doing)
- Going to chamber of commerce networking meetings to hand out business cards
- Any other type of marketing that requires little to no effort on your part
However, just like with mac & cheese, there is a downside to legal marketing without a purpose or strategy. Eventually it will cause you to have a heart-attack, just like mac & cheese.
Legal Marketing is not supposed to be easy
If you want to build a successful law practice, which suits your needs and goals, then you have to be hands on with your legal marketing. You need to have goals and actively participate in your marketing efforts. You can’t blindly pay marketing “consultants” to do all the work for you.
Legal marketing is hard work. It takes time and effort. I devote one full day per week to marketing my law firm and systems development – I don’t do any legal work or meet with any clients on Wednesdays. And I do a whole lot of marketing on other days as well, including blog posts, articles, working on my book, having marketing lunches and other meetings with key referral sources, etc.
There is an upside to all of this work. Most other lawyers aren’t doing it. They will tell you that they don’t have time because of all the cases they are working on (I suppose that is a good problem to have), but what is the quality of those cases? How many of those clients are paying their bills on time? What is their average fee per client? What are their monthly revenue numbers? How many hours per week do they work?
At the end of the day, it is possible to build the law practice of your dreams. You can work on your terms and still provide a valuable service to your clients that they will be willing to talk about to their friends and colleagues.
And that’s all we want, isn’t it? You are better than mac & cheese, and so is your legal marketing.
Have an innovative marketing idea that you would like to share? Something that is working for you but you know that no other lawyers are doing it? Feel free to comment below. I may profile your idea in a future post or ask you to come on my podcast to interview you about your idea.
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