As a lawyer, you’re probably spending most of your time and energy delivering great legal services, managing your team, and ensuring that you get paid. In fact, when you get busy, you probably focus ALL your time and energy there. It’s hard to keep up with the business development, so when the work is finished…it’s crickets. When you don’t know where your next client file is coming from—when you’re just going with the flow—practicing law can be feast or famine.

Do you have a marketing plan that keeps your funnel full, even when you’re busy serving existing clients?

This week’s tip is to review your marketing plan: does it contain the 4 key marketing assets that bring you a consistent flow of new business?

Welcome to Gimbal’s Tip of the Week, where you get practical, actionable advice you can use right away to start building a more productive and profitable legal practice.

When you think of your law practice like an airplane, its engines are Marketing and Sales. We’ll get to Sales later in our How to Grow a Business series. Marketing always comes firms. Getting your marketing engine firing on all cylinders, following a consistent, optimized process, will provide the thrust that the wings require to create lift and safely move your law firm business forward.

We’re not suggesting you pour a fortune into advertising. Here are four things you can do first to get that marketing engine in shape. 

Your action item this week is to review the way you market your practice and ask yourself if you have each of these four marketing assets in your marketing plan. 

•  A One-Liner: A sentence (or two) that summarizes what you do and piques a potential client’s interest in your legal products or services.
•  A Landing Page: A page on your website where people can learn more about your services and take the next action you want them to take (e.g. call you, download something, or send a request)
•  A Lead Generator: A lead generator is a valuable piece of information that answers a question or solves a problem for a potential client, that you make available on your landing page in exchange for an email address. It’s a low-cost marketing asset you can get working for you fast…and we’re going a free training on how to create one tomorrow! 
•  Follow-up Communications: After your potential clients give you an email address, you can send them regular emails that answer questions about your services and continue to earn their trust, so you’re top of mind when they’re ready to retain you.

Start with your one-liner. At Gimbal, we’ve noticed that a lot of lawyers who are really great at practicing law often struggle to run their businesses efficiently. We teach legal professionals the business skills that law school didn’t teach them, so they can run their practices more productively and profitably.

So our one-liner here at Gimbal is that we coach lawyers to be as great at running their businesses as they are at practicing law. Can you come up with something similar for your practice?

Legal professionals who follow a marketing plan that includes these four assets will consistently generate more qualified leads and finally escape the feast and famine cycle.

Stay tuned for the rest of the series.