10 Tips on achieving marketing professionalism: what you need to know to earn respect from legal professionals.
| Author | Mariam, Tom |
As the economy continues to struggle and firms brace for budget cuts and layoffs, earning and maintaining a professional reputation among attorneys is more important than ever. For those looking to establish their reputations, Bruce W. Marcus offers advice based on decades of professional services marketing experience. A one-time speech-writer for Robert F. Kennedy, Marcus has consulted for major accounting and law firms and financial organizations.
Marcus emphasizes that skills and experience form the foundation of professionalism as a marketer. "Demonstrate that you understand your clients' or your firm's needs," he says." A pro is also someone who performs at peak capacity, even when he doesn't feel like it."
"You have to know your craft, not alone in terms of the tools of marketing, but as a dynamic to help build and shape practices," says Marcus. "Marketing is not press releases. Marketing is not brochures. Marketing is not seminars. Marketing is the strategy. The tools are the way you execute the strategy.
"A legal marketing professional must understand the legal profession and practice," Marcus says. "If you build a marketing culture, all of your skills, all of your tools, will ultimately lead to the development of practice."
According to Marcus, "You build a marketing culture by having the individuals in each practice group participate in marketing for each group.
"I do an exercise within each practice. What are the specific businesses within each group's practice? For instance, in real estate, it might be commercial, development, residential and so forth. What percentage of your group's clientele contributes the greatest revenue, and which contribute the least? Where are the growth factors? What are the static factors? What are the declining factors? When you have identified the growth factors, you then see each market as separate, requiring its own marketing program."
To enhance building the marketing culture, the individual attorneys must learn to participate in some form of networking. "Make your lawyers visible," he says. "They need to expose their skills. That's what networking is all about."
Positioning is one of the least understood-but one of the most important--aspects of marketing, says Marcus. "Positioning begins with understanding a prospect's most urgent...
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