The National Law Forum article, 13 Signs It Is Time to Hire an Outside Marketing Professional, offers a variety of reasons why a lawyer or firm might consider getting outside help with their marketing.
Basically, when you recognize the need, but lack the time or expertise to do the job in-house, go outside for help.
There’s some good advice here, but I’d like to differ with one of the “reasons” offered:
Marketing Takes Up More Than 15 Minutes of Your Billable Time
As an attorney, you should spend most of your time doing what you do best. If you spend more than 15 minutes per day writing and scheduling tweets, checking marketing metrics, or optimizing your blog posts, you are wasting time that should be spent researching, meeting with clients, or preparing for court. Outsource these tasks to a professional.
Of course you should have someone else handle marketing-related tasks like editing, checking stats, and the like. But that’s admin, not marketing.
Marketing means building relationships with prospective clients and referral sources, something you can’t (shouldn’t) delegate.
Marketing means strengthening relationships with existing clients, to foster repeat business and referrals. You can have your staff help you with this but you need to be at the helm.
Marketing means investing time with personal development, to improve your communication, sales and interpersonal relationship skills.
And marketing means familiarizing yourself with the elements of technical strategies, e.g., Internet, PPC ads, etc., so that if you hire someone, in-house or outside, you’ll know what you want from them and you can make sure they’re giving you what you want.
And, all of this takes time.
So, although I suggest dedicating 15 minutes a day to marketing, please understand this is just a start.
Many lawyers won’t do more more than that. But some lawyers, the ones who are good at marketing and are getting lots of new business as a result, may find it more profitable to continue doing what they’re doing and delegate more legal work.
Which is what I did in my practice. It allowed me to multiply my income and reduce my work to three days per week.
Learn more here
