Naughty or Nice? Tips for Great Legal Marketing in 2024, Regardless of Market Forecast
It’s that time of year again!
Elf on the Shelf has made his creep-tastic appearance in homes and all over social media. In-person holiday parties seem to back in fashion. Law firms are deep in budget season. (Sorry to bring the Scrooge energy here.)
Budget season is a stressful time for firms, lawyers and marketing professionals. As always, the prognosticators are prognosticating, and the forecasters are forecasting. And the predictions for 2024 are all over the place.
BTI Consulting Group recently released its “BTI Practice Outlook 2024: Navigating Legal Spending and Needs in the New Unpredictable World,” its yearly, in-depth look at the legal services market. BTI’s research indicates an increased demand for outside counsel hiring – in fact, BTI predicts that legal spending on outside counsel is on track to set another record in the coming year. In addition, the research indicates that clients are facing the “widest spectrum of legal needs in decades”— so much so that six different practice areas are expected to command “the highest rate premiums in years” (you’ll have to buy the report to find out which ones, and a whole lot more information as well). In fact, BTI predicts:
“Prepare for what is going to be another surprisingly strong year for the firms putting business development up front. There are few places where clients don’t have substantial needs.” And apparently, based on the research interviews, clients are open to hiring new firms, even as they indicate the desire to give more work to a core group of their existing firms, in what BTI is calling “quiet convergence.”
Sounds great, right? A broader legal marketplace, with higher legal spend, and clients that want to give more work to at least some of their existing firms but are open to trying out new firms.
Maybe not so fast.
Just last week, Law.com reported in two separate articles continued concerns from law firm leaders about the prognosis for 2024. In one article, the research indicated that fewer managing partners and C-level firm leaders that last year (although still more than half) believed that revenue would grow, and more believed that costs would rise (even before the recent spate of announcements of associate raises and bonuses), that legal demand overall seems to have cooled, and that many firm leaders are feeling “less than rosy” about the outlook for 2024. The second article noted that not all law firms were “down on 2024” in terms of revenue growth, with some anticipating a “better year” overall as a result of continued strength in areas such as litigation, regulatory and investigations (which tracks with BTI’s conclusions as well) and bankruptcy/restructuring, as well as a potential rebound in transactional work.
One through-line in all of the reporting on firms’ outlooks for 2024 is that budgetary concerns are real – whether that’s costs, collections or some other concern. In general, my (very unscientific) experience (and that of many of my colleagues) is that marketing budgets will be tighter than ever, and that lawyers, practices and marketing departments will have to do more with less.
So, how do you market yourself (or your practice or firm) in the face of both uncertain market conditions and shrinking budgets?
Here are four tips to help you market strong, no matter what 2024 brings.
Set your objectives and make a plan.
Random acts of marketing can be both risky and expensive. In an ideal marketing world, you will have already thought critically about your business development objectives before you commit to spending your marketing resources for next year. But if not, now is the time to identify and prioritize your opportunities – whether it’s branching out into new client or market sectors or strengthening your position in your current markets, attracting more, new or different clients or deepening your relationship and enhancing “stickiness” with your existing clients. Once you know your business development objectives, you can map your marketing to them. Anything that doesn’t align with your business development priorities should not be given much, if any, marketing resources.
Now is also a good time to consider conducting a marketing audit—or what I call a “look back to look forward” analysis. Ideally, you’ve been tracking the performance of your marketing efforts over the last year as you went along, but if not, no problem. Even a quick look back at what worked well and what may need improvement (or even shelving) can help you determine where to put your energies and resources for the coming year.
Elevate your visibility.
All of the research and reporting on the coming year brings me to back to a point I’ve reiterated a number of times: you can’t control the market, but you can control how you show up in it. Up-leveling your visibility in the marketplace is a good move no matter the industry or practice area, and it’s especially important in a tighter legal market—whether you’re looking to get more work from your existing clients or attract new ones. The good news is that some of the basic elements of visibility are (or should be) part of your marketing already and likely can be tweaked without a lot of spend if budgets are tight.
In today’s market, where clients do a significant amount of digital due diligence, the bedrock of visibility is your online presence – your firm website, practice pages, lawyer bios and LinkedIn and other social media pages. They should be accurate and up to date; if a new website or major overhaul is not in the budget for this year, a quick audit and refresh could be a cost-effective improvement for practice groups or even the whole firm. Individual lawyers should be review and update their bios regularly — at a minimum quarterly — to make sure they accurately reflect the work they do and to add new representative matters, client successes, publications, events and awards.
Social media is another part of your online presence and a core component of visibility in the legal marketplace, with LinkedIn as the primary (but not only) platform. At a minimum, lawyers and firms should have fully developed LinkedIn profiles. Increasing your activity on social media even just a little can quickly elevate your visibility even further. Market research shows that those who make legal hiring decisions use LinkedIn as a resource for news and developments. Posting original content, as well as commenting on, responding to and sharing other’s content on LinkedIn — provides opportunities to showcase your expertise with your audiences.
Fine tune your content strategies and processes.
Branded content and thought leadership are essential elements of legal services marketing. Yet an estimated 60 to 70% of B2B marketing content goes un- or under-used. That statistic actually refers to finalized content that doesn't get used in the marketing process, and doesn't include content that’s planned and may even be in process, but never gets over the finish line, for one reason or another. While that stat is not specific to the legal services market, anecdotal evidence (i.e., my experience and those of my legal marketing colleagues) suggests that it’s in line with what happens with law firm content programs. A lot of great branded content and thought leadership gets stuck in process somewhere, dying on the vine as stale and ultimately unusable. And content that does make it out of the process is often under-leveraged – treated as single-use rather than as pieces that can be deployed over multiple channels or serve as starting points for other forms of content.
All of this is a waste of time and resources. But before you scrap content initiatives in the name of cost savings, consider that there may be tweaks that can be made to turn a struggling content program into a success. A first step is to identify the “black holes” in the process that can be fixed. Are you struggling to get lawyers to contribute consistently? Is quality or quantity (or both) an issue? Is there a bottleneck in the review or approval process? Consider, too, whether you’re leveraging content across all of your available channels.
Optimize your marketing technology.
In today’s competitive legal market, strategic deployment of technology can give marketing teams incredible power to scale their efforts to reach and engage with their target markets and audiences. That said, marketing technology can be an expensive investment, and it’s important to make sure that you’re getting all you can out of the technology tools that are available to you. While technology that’s not being used to its optimal capacity is a waste of money, lack of technology can also hold back your marketing—for example, do you have great content but struggle to distribute it effectively to all of your audience? If you can you identify areas where technology would make a significant impact, it may be worth committing a portion of the budget (tight as it may be) for that kind of investment.
See you in 2024! It’s anybody’s (educated) guess what next year will bring to the legal services market, but you can be ready to take advantage of opportunities that come your way.
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