How to find small firm marketing success – Part 2

21st, May 2015

Path to targetWant to make the most of your marketing resources? In my last post, I shared 5 takeaways from a LMA small firm marketer roundtable. Here are 5 more tips to help any professional service firm find marketing success.

6. Repurpose all of your content. It can be very challenging to get firm members to write and speak so leverage everything they do. Someone wrote an article? Great, you can promote it as is, but also shorten it and put it out as 1 or more blog posts. Lengthen it or combine it with related content and make it a whitepaper. Turn it into a PowerPoint, webinar or video clips. Create other visuals like charts and infographics to highlight aspects of the article. Then post these different formats on your website as well as push them out via social media and email. That article will now have new life in several different formats and can be promoted over a long period of time to attract more people.

7. Manage expectations. Marketing takes time, effort and money, oftentimes more than partners would like. Writing, speaking, networking, meetings, follow up are a lot of work. And results may not be as dramatic or quick as some in the firm had hoped. That great article, speech, research study may not have brought in clients or gotten tons of press. But marketing isn’t a failure simply because there wasn’t an immediate or significant result. As mentioned in the last post, measure and track results. Look for small, but incremental changes. And realize that it’s seldom one single thing that definitively brings in business. You get clients by consistently making yourself visible and credible in a meaningful way that resonates with your prospects.

8. Share contacts across the firm. At some firms, members are reluctant to share their contacts. Everyone keeps their own, which creates a host of problems as well as limits firm-wide marketing efforts. With no centralized database, you can’t analyze and segment your contacts to better market to them. It may be difficult to monitor email metrics across the firm (opens, clicks, opt-outs, etc.). Individual members may not keep data up-to-date and may not be capturing the same information for each person. Also if something happens to that firm member, what happens to those contacts?

9. Share financial information. As with sharing contacts, the reluctance of firm members to share financial information, such as revenue and profitability, new business sources, etc., is problematic. Whatever the reason for withholding that information among the members, keeping it from marketers and outside consultants, can make it difficult for them to do their jobs. If you want them to advise you on how to grow revenue, they need an accurate picture of the business. Which practice groups are growing or the most profitable? Which members are bringing in the most/least business? The answers to these and other questions help determine priorities and allocation of resources. And when you are a small firm with limited resources you have to make the most of what you do.

10. Hire outside resources when needed and get quality help. Designers, writers, business and marketing consultants, public relations firms, etc. can help you with your marketing even on a small budget. They can take on the burden of certain tasks or introduce a different perspective. They also free up your time so you can focus on what you do best.

Hopefully these 10 tips will help you maximize your own marketing budget. Thanks to the LMA New York Chapter, Small Firm SIG chair and moderator Bruce Segall of Marketing Sense and panelists Michelle Birckhead of Chiesa, Shahinian and Giantomasi, Abby Fairman of Richards Kibbe & Orbe and Alan Levine of Levine Marketing Solutions as well as the other meeting attendees for their great tips.

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