The biggest mistake with law firm marketing isn’t choosing the wrong platform, creating poor content, or failing to spend enough money. It’s that they start with tactics instead of strategy.
If your law firm’s marketing consists of randomly posting on LinkedIn, creating occasional blogs because “content is king,” or spending money on Google Ads without a coherent plan, you’re effectively throwing money into a marketing black hole.
Let me be clear. Most law firms have no marketing strategy. Zero. None. They have a collection of random marketing activities that they hope, by some mysterious alchemy, will transform into a steady stream of qualified clients. This approach is not just ineffective – it’s a spectacular waste of money.
The Logical Marketing Sequence
What most law firms don’t understand is that marketing has a logical sequence, and it starts with strategy, not tactics.
The sequence looks like this: Diagnosis → Strategy → Tactics.
Diagnosis means understanding your market. Who are your most profitable clients? What problems do they face? What keeps them up at night? Which competitors are they considering? Without this information, you’re just guessing.
Strategy means making choices. Which segments will you target? What position will you take in the market? What do you want to be famous for? What’s the one thing you want potential clients to think when they hear your firm’s name?
Tactics come last. Only after you’ve done proper diagnosis and strategy should you decide on your website design, content marketing plan, or social media approach.
Yet most law firms operate in reverse. They jump straight to tactics – “We need a podcast!” – without any strategic direction. It’s marketing malpractice.
The Reality Check
Your typical corporate client doesn’t wake up thinking about your law firm. They don’t care about your founding story, your values, or your stunning office views. They care about their own problems.
Take a step back from your own firm and look at the legal market through your clients’ eyes. When they need legal help, they face a sea of sameness – countless firms claiming to be “client-focused,” “results-oriented,” and staffed with “experienced professionals.” Everyone says they provide “exceptional service.” These aren’t points of differentiation; they’re the bare minimum expected of any law firm.
If your marketing reads like everyone else’s, you’re invisible. And invisible firms compete on price.
The Critical Questions
Before spending another dollar on marketing, your law firm needs to answer these critical questions:
- Who are our most profitable client segments, and which ones should we focus on? (You can’t be all things to all people.)
- What specific problems do we solve for these clients that they actually care about?
- What makes our approach genuinely different from competitors? (And no, “our people” is not a differentiator.)
- What evidence can we provide to demonstrate our authority in solving these problems?
- What are our clear objectives for marketing? (And “more clients” isn’t specific enough.)
These questions aren’t easy to answer. They require honest introspection and sometimes painful choices about what you won’t do. But without clear answers, your marketing will remain unfocused and ineffective.
The Strategy Advantage
When you finally develop a clear strategy, something magical happens: marketing decisions become easier. You’ll know which conferences to attend, which content to create, and which clients to pursue.
A law firm that specializes in helping technology startups with intellectual property issues will make very different marketing decisions than one focusing on high-net-worth divorce cases. Their websites will look different, their content will address different problems, and they’ll appear in completely different places.
That clarity is the power of strategy. It creates focus, and focus creates impact.
The Path Forward
If your law firm is serious about growth, stop the random acts of marketing. Take a step back and invest time in developing a real strategy. This means:
- Conducting proper research with your best clients to understand their selection criteria
- Analyzing your most profitable work to identify patterns
- Making hard choices about who you want to serve and what you want to be known for
- Creating a clear, compelling position that’s meaningful to clients and defensible against competitors
Only then should you determine which marketing tactics will best deliver on that strategy.
The legal market is too competitive for the spray-and-pray approach to marketing. Firms that win don’t just outspend their competitors – they outthink them. And that starts with strategy.