Marketing

What does marketing mean for Lawyers and Law firms?

The term marketing has changed and evolved over a period of time. Today, marketing is based around providing continual benefits to the customer; these benefits will be provided and a transactional exchange will take place.

The Chartered Institute of Marketing defines marketing as "The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably"

Marketing is a management responsibility and should not be solely left to junior partners and staff.

Marketing requires co-ordination, planning,implementation of campaigns and a competent manager or outsourced partner with the appropriate skills to ensure success.

Your firm’s marketing objectives, goals and targets have to be monitored and met, competitor strategies analysed, anticipated and exceeded. Through effective use of market and marketing research, your firm should be able to identify the needs and wants of your targeted customers and try to deliver benefits that will enhance or add to the customer’s lifestyle, while at the same time ensuring that the satisfaction of these needs results in a healthy turnover for the firm.

Philip Kotler defines marketing as “satisfying needs and wants through an exchange process”. It is not the art of finding clever ways to promote your services; it is the art of creating genuine customer value.

Within this exchange transaction, customers will only exchange what they value (money) if they feel that their needs are being fully satisfied; clearly, the greater the benefit provided, the higher transactional value an organisation can charge.

How are Scottish Law firms marketing themselves?

In our experience, very few law firms are marketing their services effectively.

Many tell us that they haven’t really needed to spend much money on marketing other than the odd advertisement in the Law Journal from time to time or a Yellow pages advert. They claim that they have a nice glossy brochure and their website has lots of information about the different departments in the firm and the services they can offer clients.

However, nowadays this is not enough. The market has changed.

It’s not just the current economic recession which has certainly contributed to declining revenues for a high percentage of firms, but there is a more fundamental change going on in terms of how clients are finding and then engaging a lawyer to provide a service.

Law firms need to understand how IT and the Communications revolution is changing and will continue to change the way in which prospective clients will utilise freely available information on the net to gather and inform themselves of potential lawyers who have the credentials to meet their requirements.

For Lawyers who have been practising for a number of years, this paradigm shift is hard to comprehend and a lack of knowledge then leads to uncertainty and often inactivity.

The key message here is that it is NOT too late to start making changes and actually embrace the technology and techniques that your clients will be using.

Help is at hand. Horsetiger can provide the advice and guidance you need.

First of all though, we need to understand more about your particular firm and engage in some business analysis.

We have a well defined process to attain the information we need.

What is the process?

The culmination of the above activities which we call the "Research and Analysis Phase" is a document entitled Market Analysis and Strategic Development Plan. The document will recommend a strategy for development and will contain a number of tactical marketing activities which will need to be implemented in order to realise the plan.

Call us now on 0131 514 6400 or contact us and invite us for a free initial consultation to explore the opportunity within your firm.