The Habitual Marketeer

This post contains a 5-step tested method to design and maintain a simple practice marketing plan. The intended audience is Junior Barristers, New Tenants and Pupils.

“Sustaining an audience is hard. It demands consistency of thought, of purpose, and of action over a long period of time”. Bruce Springsteen

1. Start with your Client

Designing your marketing activities with a real person in mind will encourage you to engage in a way which resonates.  Participants in the #JuniorEntrepreneur workshop series complete a detailed Ideal Client Profile (ICP) template which identifies the following traits in their ideal client:

• Demographics
• Psychographics
• Where they spend time, in person and online
• Their decision-making process
• The underlying problem they need their barrister to solve
• The consequences of not solving that problem.

You can google Ideal Client Profile (or Ideal Client Avatar) to source a generic template to start you off.   Website subscribers receive an ICP template which is designed exclusively for barristers’ use.  The more you can demonstrate you understand the problem you are solving for your client, the more likely you will build a working relationship built on trust for the long-term.

2. Select your channels strategically

Since you are the Marketing Director of your practice as well as the Chief Service Provider, you need to choose your marketing channels strategically. You will need a mix of online and in person channels, and ideally, at least one of each. You don’t have time to adapt content for every channel ever created. Just select a couple which will work for your practice.

The marketing channels which are best for your practice are determined by your ideal client. If he reads LinkedIn, publish articles and posts on LinkedIn. If she attends a particular networking group, sign up to receive notifications of those events. If he is on Twitter a couple of times a day, make sure you are using Twitter to link back to your content. Choose your channel, measure your engagement and commit to building your profile for a period of time before considering whether to go somewhere else.

3. Batch and plan your content in advance

You can write about whatever you like, but keep in mind that the purpose of your marketing is to lead to an instruction. Posts about your hobbies inform a picture of who you are and will help clients decide whether they want to work with you. Posts showing how brilliant is your legal analysis is a requirement but remember that the average attention span of social media readers is quite shortlong, so be sparing of the minutiae.  Copywriting is a skill which can be learned; the language of your skeletons is unlikely to grab attention.

When deciding on what to write, publish or speak, consider these prompts:

• What do you want to share?
• On what do you want to shine a spotlight as it relates to the legal profession or The Bar?
• To what do you want to draw attention about your practice?
• What are the topics you find worthy of conversation?
• What does your ideal client want to read about?

Set a timer for 15 minutes and create a list of 26 topics you’d like to publish. Ask your clerk to review it with you and together, select the best four. These four topics will be your content for next month.  Set aside a session to binge-write four topics and then set them aside until you are ready to publish.

4. Be consistent with your timing and frequency

The most important thing in marketing is consistency. You will refine and tweak your content over time but if you are to smooth out the peaks and troughs associated with a career at The Bar, you need to market your services all the time, not just when the pipeline is arid.

You will know already that the time to market your services is when you are busy. When you are busy:

• There is an energy and urgency about you and your practice
• It’s clear that other people are already instructing you
• You don’t appear desperate for work. (Desperation is the banana skin on the road to interesting instructions.)

Pick one timeslot every week to market your practice. Tuesday at 3pm. Friday at 10am. Ask your ideal client when they are online and choose that time. Test and amend as necessary.  The key is consistency.

5. Plan it out

There are two schools of thought about planning. One is that you need to plan;  the other is that you don’t. Churchill recognised the importance of planning and I adhere to the idea that it’s essential.

Once you have a plan, you have a fighting chance of implementing at least a part of it. Practice development gets shunted off the priority list, especially when cases are arriving thick and fast, but a plan will help you not to forget that practice marketing has to be done consistently.

For the month ahead, create a simple schedule like this one:

Week 1
Topic
Channel
Timing

Week 2
Topic
Channel
Timing

And so on. This is a good-enough structure to kick-start a practice marketing habit. Starting is easy; consistency requires commitment.

The Habitual Marketeer session in the #JuniorEntrepreneur Workshop Series introduces the concept of practice marketing. The Foundation Course guides you through the steps to create an integrated Practice Plan, including a marketing schedule. 

By Heidi Smith
Creator of Jurilogical.com