Planning your marketing campaigns is vital when deciding to chase new business – just having a plan to follow and measure along the way. But why in reverse?
Well, before you start deciding where, when and how you are going to market your campaign, you need to identify exactly what your goal is for the marketing campaign. You are going to be spending money, what do you want after all the work is done?
Question 1 must be: What do I want from all this marketing?
- • 2 additional property deals larger than R5m a month
- • 2 additional clients in the SME business sector
- • 2 additional clients on retainers of R5000 or more a month
- • 2 additional divorce cases per month
Get the idea – exactly how many and what size per month/week/day – the more detail you have about what exactly it is you want the achieve the easier it will be to plan and excuse the campaign.
Brilliant, you know what you want. The next step back has got to be how you are going to measure the success of the campaign. This to a certain degree hinges on what the marketing platform is going to be, but even if it is a record of calls/conversions/failures/details in an Excel spreadsheet, it must be measured. Then these marketing results have to become part of the weekly business meetings, so make sure the firm is on track towards the goal.
Question 2: How will we measure the effectiveness of the campaign?
OK, you know what you want and how to measure the progress – but now you need to work out who the people or organisations are that you are going to target. Are the people young, single, married, income bracket, careers, families, outgoing etc. The more detail you can gather about your target market, the more accurate you can be when designing your content to grab their attention. Finding the perfect need.
Question 3: What is your target market?
Now that you have identified your target market, where do these people “hang out”, what do they read, where do their kids go to school, what sport do they play – basically where and how do you put your law firm name up in front of them to get their attention. Do they use Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or Blogs?
Question 4: Where do you market for maximum results?
We all know your firm survives by doing legal work, and none of that stops while you are trying to bring in more business. Unless you allocate exact times and or resources to the marketing efforts, you are dead in the water from the very start. Most will use existing staff – that is why allocating marketing time to exact hours of the day for people is a must!
Question 5: Who and When? Allocate people and dedicated times for marketing
Most of your investment is going to be time, with a bit of money thrown in for good measure, but make sure you set a budget – in time spend on the campaign as well as the spend. Add this budget to the measuring results, so you are always aware of how much you have left for the month.
Last Question: What is the budget for the campaign?
Generally, when we decide to market, we race off and stick an advert in a newspaper to promote the firm, then start thinking about the rest of the stuff that needs to happen.
Putting the end goal first, forces us to be more focused and effective in planning and implementing the campaign.
