Marketing for Accountants
Our unique, distinctive and proven legal marketing methodology!
Strategy
It all starts and ends with strategy! We kick off with a deep dive into your accounting firm. We’re looking at things like positioning, brand archetypes, and client personas, among numerous other things.
Experience
The client experience matters the most! We’re different from most other agencies that are often one-dimensionally focused on marketing tactics. We’re focused on the continuum from strategy to creating an exceptional client experience at this stage.
Build
With a strategy done, it’s all about building a diverse range of assets to fulfil the process. This sees our team traversing everything design and technology.
Reach
At this stage, our focus shifts to lead generation, lead nurture and conversion. At the outset, we’re ensuring we have the technology to underpin lead flow. Following this, it’s all about traffic, generating leads through a comprehensive approach including paid and organic search and social.
Optimise
This stage is all about conversion rate optimisation. Ensuring that month after month, we see improvement on every front.
The Methodology of Marketing for Accountants
Our unique, distinctive and proven accounting marketing methodology!
The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Accounting Firms
We’ve worked with professional services firms of all sizes for nearly 15 years. Over that time, we’ve learnt what works and what doesn’t regarding marketing. In this guide, we will explain the attributes of effective accounting marketing.
Digital Marketing for Accountants & Accounting Firms
Accounting marketing is transitioning from a geographically confined, relationship-driven discipline to a complex, expertise-based approach that uses technology and scientific methods to target specialized audiences across various industries. This innovative strategy can significantly affect a firm’s reputation, visibility, new client acquisition, service offers, pricing, client retention, and recruiting.
Marketing is frequently mixed up with sales and business growth. Understanding a specific prospect’s needs, proposing a specific set of services to fulfil them, and convincing the prospect to purchase the services is the process of sales. On the other hand, marketing is identifying a market’s demands, adapting your offers to those needs, raising awareness of a firm’s services, and encouraging eligible prospects to contact you for additional information.
To put it another way, marketing is the process of producing qualifying opportunities. The goal of sales is to convert such opportunities into clients.
The Fast Firms Story
Fast Firms was founded by multi-award-winning lawyer Dan Toombs. A creative at heart, Dan changed laws and practices within the Queensland criminal justice system. Later after working in New York with a legal innovation hub while on a Winston Churchill Fellowship, he founded the Queensland Criminal Justice Centre (QCJC), which was then the only technology-driven platform that educated Judicial officers, lawyers and allied professionals on the idiosyncrasies of working with marginalised people caught in the system. It consequently won numerous awards.
Later, Dan founded Queensland’s first community access points in Magistrates Courts throughout Queensland. Soon after, he and his team of technologists designed and developed possibly Australia’s first online will kit. In its first 12 months, it provided 7000 free wills to people. Dan was later appointed to the board of Legal Aid Queensland, assisting in forming their digital strategy.
Emanating from this accumulative work, law firms sought the assistance of Dan and his team to help in their digital transformation; consequently, Fast Firms came to fruition. Fast Firms started working with various legal organisations in Australia and the United States. Dan and the Fast Firms team later worked with Erin Brockovich on the digital strategy and deployment of mass tort campaigns, which evolved into significant class actions, one of which brought a major pharmaceutical company to its knees. The team also worked with Erin on forming her environmental issue-reporting platform, the Community Health Book.
Responding to the ever-changing legal industry, Fast Firms today has become a top brand, design, marketing, and technology company.
The name Fast Firms was influenced by “Fast Company,” the publication in the United States for forward-thinking, progressive businesses who are on the front foot in growing market share through innovation.
Understanding your clients and your market
Accounting marketing begins with understanding. You can’t promote your services to potential clients until you know their needs.
This doesn’t imply that you must become an expert in their profession. You don’t have to be an engineer to know an engineering firm’s accounting needs. However, the more you understand their problems, the better your marketing will be.
So research your target market and the businesses that operate inside it. This will offer you an advantage over firms that think every business is the same.
Winning New Clients for Your Accounting Marketing
Accounting used to be a stable profession. When a company hired an accountant, the relationship lasted. Changing firms was both costly and complicated.
That is still true to some extent now. Many of your clients have most likely been with you for many years. However, it is becoming simpler for firms to shop elsewhere. Moving to a new accountant isn’t as tricky as it once was because of technological advances. This broadens the market and increases customer choice. It also provides an excellent chance for nimble, proactive firms to acquire new clients.
However, to gain new clients, you need to understand marketing. Fast Firms can help you get started.
Building a Marketing Plan for Your Practice
An accounting marketing plan will help you stay focused and should be consistent with your business plan. This is because effective marketing will assist you in meeting your business objectives. Your accounting marketing strategy should incorporate the following elements:
- What USP (unique selling point) distinguishes you from the competition? Why should prospects choose you above your competitors?
- SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis: Understand what you’re strong at and where you can improve. Keep an eye out for business hazards and possibilities.
- Make a target list of the best possible clients for your business. Start locally and work your way outward.
- Marketing services: Which of your company’s services are the most profitable? Which ones are most likely to pique the interest of prospects? Which are the most easily sold?
- Realistic goals and time frames: What are your objectives? How long should it take you to achieve your objectives? How will you gauge your success?
- Marketing tactics: Create a timetable of the steps you’ll take to accomplish your objectives.
Accountant Marketing Tools You Should Employ
Accounting marketing is not a single activity. It is a plan that must be implemented throughout your firm. Here are marketing channels you could utilise:
- Client feedback – This is one of the most efficient marketing strategies. Personal recommendations are significantly more valuable than words from strangers. Request that your clients refer their professional connections to you.
- Your website – Regularly update your website with engaging and relevant content. Check that everything looks fine and that the contact information is correct.
- Social media channels – Accountants aren’t necessarily adept at using social media to promote their practice. However, it is essential to make an effort. Your clients are most likely on social media, and you need to be where they are. If no one from the firm volunteers to conduct this task, contact a consultant or an agency like Fast Firms to assist you.
- Email marketing – Email newsletters continue to be very effective. They must be well-written, well-targeted, and beneficial to the recipients. Write about tax deadlines, budget implications, new tax legislation, and anything else you believe your clients would be interested in.
Why Accounting Marketing Fails
- Wrong skillsets – You realise the importance of having the necessary skillsets to give high-quality services in other areas of your accounting firm. However, many organisations overlook this reality when promoting accounting marketing services.Marketing now demands diverse abilities, ranging from writing and search engine optimisation to social media and site analytics. However, when it comes to hiring, many businesses want to save costs rather than enhance the effect of their marketing. They may recruit competent individuals but are given so many jobs that they cannot do them. However, most businesses do not grasp the skills necessary to implement a modern marketing plan.
- Failure to completely execute – Some firms can have a viable plan but struggle to see it through to completion. Their investment is squandered since it is never completely realised. An early surge of excitement fades swiftly as novelty gives way to effort. For example, a firm planned a monthly webinar series, but after the first one or two, enthusiasm waned, and the effort died. We’ve seen this with blogging, networking, and any marketing endeavour that demands consistent effort over time. It is significantly easier to devote one’s focus to paying client work.These initiatives are sometimes deliberately stifled. When a new strategy fails to provide immediate results, it’s easy for a firm to lose trust and revert to “tried and true” tactics that occasionally succeed. They frequently come to a halt just as the method is about to take off.Then there’s the issue of responsibility and oversight. While many accounting firms require yearly business growth plans, they do not include a system to track their implementation. There will be few outcomes if there is no pressure to deliver.
- A Busted Funnel – Every sales funnel has three major components: the top, where potential clients first discover your firm, the middle, where you cultivate prospects and gain their trust and the bottom, where prospects become paying clients.The problem is that some firms do not connect all of the dots or leave out a critical component. Prospects are unable to travel through the funnel efficiently when this occurs. They either become trapped along the route or lose interest and exit the funnel entirely.For example, a firm may focus on strategies that attract new prospects but make no promises to further the relationship. A firm may publish blog entries that attract new visitors. However, no mechanism for further interaction is included in the blog article – no offers for additional information or comparable services. The new client is left to wonder what to do next.Every marketing strategy should have a place in the funnel, and each should have a clear next action that advances the prospect a bit farther.
Content for Clients
When content dries up in a law firm, so does everything else from a marketing perspective. It’s not unusual for our work with law firms on every facet of marketing, to begin with, great gusto and then find it wanes significantly over time. Consequently, that’s the very reason that we have our own content team of professionally qualified and experienced journalists to write client-focussed content. We also find ourselves writing content simply because lawyers being lawyers, they can find it difficult to simplify their language.
A great method to consider your law firm’s content is through our methodology of early, mid or late-stage content. This type of approach allows our marketing team to align objectives from both disciplines.
Early Stage Content
We consider early-stage content to be “top of the funnel.” In other words, it’s content focussed towards a potential client and it’s general and all-encompassing in nature. For example, for a potential family law client it may be, “7 Things You Need to Know Before Separation.”
Content like this is largely broad-brush and doesn’t go into detail about specifics. It’s early-stage content to encourage a journey to go deeper.
Mid-Stage Content
Using the same approach, mid-stage content is a deeper analysis of a key topic. Using the same example as above, it may be that one of your 7 things to consider before separation, is to start considering their full asset pool and ways they should do this.
Late Stage Content
Considering the funnel methodology, late-stage content is primarily focussed on conversion. To this extent, again using the same example above, a further deepening of the lead journey maybe now to offer an online solution that can assist in the building of a property pool report and answer other related questions. Tools like Settify and Family Property are great examples of pointing late-stage content towards.
Content Creation for Clients
Invariably in our work with law firms, the content creation focus is nearly always on lead generation. In other words, all about getting new business rather than enhancing the experience of your current clients.
At Fast Firms, through the many years of doing this work, we know that one happy client can draw in 10 other potential clients. Accordingly, intercepting the client journey with what we call “wow” moments can have an extraordinary impact on the client experience generally.
For a large personal injury practice, with the firm, we created a whole subset of content (articles, guides, podcasts and videos) to enrich the client experience. For example, 2 weeks from a client attending a medical review examination, the client receives a video from the relevant lawyer giving a heads up on what to expect and how to prepare. Similarly, for a family law practice, we’ve intercepted the journey with content focused on key moments, like mediation. In this case, the managing partner of the firm did a stellar informative video about what’s about to happen.
In the same vein, we have designed countless matter road maps for clients who during their first consultation want to contextualise their legal problem in the broader picture. Road maps are also excellent for exposing the client to other practice areas they may traverse during the lifecycle of their matter and affirm to them, that related practice areas may come into play and the fact that the firm can offer holistic service in this regard. It’s likely that your diverse practice law firm has lost a client to another legal practice because the client did not realise that you could assist in that area of law.
At Fast Firms, we adopt a thorough approach to our marketing, uncovering multiple facets that simply put, agencies that do not understand the industry will miss or agencies without the coverage will not be able to deliver.
Email Marketing for Law Firms
Yes, we know what you’re going to say and that is, “does email marketing really work for law firms?”
Unequivocally, the answer is “yes.” However, it is dependent upon a number of factors. The most important being ensuring that your choice of third-party email campaign software is a good one. As you’re aware, increasingly emails are being blocked or re-categorised into promotional or junk folders by email platforms. Consequently, to improve your open rates you have to be sure that your firm has a delivery rate of 100% or close enough to it. Despite at times using a recommended third-party email campaign software, delivery rates can fall short because the agencies typically use the default settings.
In addition to ensuring your law firm’s choice of technology is a sound one, you should always segment your email database into practice areas and/or industry groups. Law firms that have one email database invariably have low open rates and high-unsubscribes purely because they’re not on the message to the relevant recipient.
Practically speaking, your recent estate planning clients do not need to know about the importance of testamentary trusts, unless of course, you’re trying to upsell. Similarly, your family law clients will not appreciate an email campaign illuminating the issues that derive from separation.
Over and above this, encourage a culture within your law firm that is client and referral source focused and get into a practice of having your lawyers spontaneously send emails to key people, pointing them to content that may be of interest to them and not necessarily content manufactured by your law firm. In this regard, you can guarantee a 100% open rate if you send an email like:
“Hi Julie, was thinking of you when I came across this article by Emily Baxter in Bloomberg. Great article. I hope you find it useful.
Hope you and John are well.”
Like every other facet of marketing, consider email campaigns to the same extent. Don’t pray and spray, ask questions focused on the broader content strategy and of course, “does this content matter to this person?”
At Fast Firms, we literally execute multiple campaigns for our clients day after day.
Talk to us today about Law Firm Email Marketing
Lead Generation & Management for Law Firms
Without a doubt, effective lead generation and management is a science and should be treated that way. Notwithstanding the fact that if your law firm ios ambitious growth-minded, you will be spending significant money on lead channels and you need to not only ensure you’re not missing any, but also that there is a dialled in approach to nurturing and managing those leads.
In this context, consider our previous mention of early, mid and late-stage content. If you have lead magnets at each juncture, you will want to manoeuvre your potential client through the lead funnel towards a file open, if of course, they meet your criteria. In executing this approach effectively you will likely need to consider CRM Technology. Simply put, a good CRM will take away all the heavy lifting in assisting your firm to graduate leads to file opens with a well-considered approach, underpinned by a series of automations that can deepen the journey with key content.
At Fast Firms, we understand CRMs thoroughly and have had experience in the integration and use of many of them, including Hubspot, Active Campaign and more recently, Microsoft Dynamics. Akin to practice management software platforms, work with us in identifying the objectives and we can assist you in the successful deployment of the technology.
Talk to Us Today About Law Firm CRM Technology
Lead Dashboards for Law Firms
At Fast Firms, we work with numerous law firms in which a CRM may be overkill. Practically speaking, for a small legal practice that is generating leads from a range of channels, having one, definitive dashboard to assess marketing ROI is essential.
We recently have deployed our own customised dashboards, porting data from a diverse range of data sets, including organic and paid search, LiveChat and phone calls.
Find out more about what we’re doing with Lead Dashboards for Law Firms.
Call Tracking for Law Firms
Successful law firms have a good measure on what marketing channel is driving leads and file opens. One often overlooked source of understanding lead acquisition are phone calls.
At Fast Firms, we’re premier partners of the best call-tracking technology on the market. We also use this technology to provide insight into how leads are being managed by key personnel within the legal practice. You wouldn’t believe what we’ve uncovered that was oblivious to the law firm.
We can help with all facets of Call Tracking for Law Firms.
Google Ads for Law Firms
Simply put, there are only two ways to drive traffic to your law firm’s website or landing pages, it’s SEO or paid search.
Smart firms do both because purely basing a growth strategy on paid search puts your legal practice at the whim of paying for leads by way of CPC (cost per click) campaigns. Take for example a compensation practice that has never entertained SEO, as more law firms are forced towards paid search, the CPC will invariably increase and the leads that you once received for $65 are now $135. We’ve been doing Google Ads for law firms for over 10 years and we remember the halcyon days when you literally could pull a compensation lead for $20 from paid search. Law firms then made literally tens of thousands of dollars weekly.
More recently we worked with a law firm who uncovered a growing niche and capitalised on it and within a very short time went from being a practice in a regional location to a national law firm.
With all this being said, Google Ads work, but they only work when you work with an agency who understands legal practice. Agencies that do not understand legal practice will spend your money on chasing irrelevant search terms and/or search terms that do not deliver paying clients. We know this sounds self-serving, but we inherit an increasing number of law firms who suffered very badly at the hands of ad agencies that did not get “legal practice.”
The other very important consideration of Google Ads is to understand that an effective strategy will pull from multiple directions. In our execution of Google ads campaigns, we can find ourselves redesigning key pages, crafting key content, recording videos, producing guides and seamlessly integrating a suite of automations via the carefully chosen CRM. When all this has been done for you with one agency, it negates the absolute nightmare of trying to facilitate discussions between your Ads agency, your web design agency, your IT agency and your graphic design agency.
Talk to us today about how we can help your law firm grow with Google Ads or if you are currently running a campaign, we can do a free assessment.
Conversion Optimisation for Law Firms
We hate to break the bad news to you, but design and marketing are based on assumptions and we know that assumptions can be wrong.
If your law firm has ever experienced working with a set and forget marketing agency, you know what we mean. In other words, you asked the agency to do a new website for your firm and a few other things, you pay them the money, then you find out that things aren’t going as planned.
At Fast Firms, we like every other agency get things wrong. But we come to every project with the view acknowledging that everything is an assumption until it’s tested. Consequently, on every website we build, for example, we run heat mapping and mouse tracking technology under it, as well as the usual data sets, primarily Google Analytics. Time and time again such data tells a different story to what was envisaged during the design and build phase and we return to the website repetitiously correcting and optimising certain design or development characteristics.
By and large, every agency your law firm may consider working with will not provide this degree of service, often because they use templated websites that they roll out from one client to the next. At Fast Firms, every website is designed pixel by pixel and we build on the best technology that will fulfil the firm’s broader strategy.
In this regard, we can find ourselves using a diverse range of platforms, from WordPress through to Headless CMS technology to data-rich websites built on platforms like Laravel.
Talk to us today about Law Firm Website Design
Appointment Scheduling Software for Law Firms
Your typical law firm client is changing. They’re increasingly becoming used to interacting and engaging with diverse industries, including banking, insurance and eCommerce who all collectively are on the front-foot with smart marketing and technology.
In this regard, there is an abundance of things your legal practice can do to match the user-experience prevalent in other industries.
At Fast Firms, we have our own appointment scheduling technology being used by a number of our clients. In partnership with a leading video-conferencing technology company based in the United States, we can assist your firm with your full video-conferencing technology needs, including payment gateways.
Third-Party Platforms
Law firms wanting to grow market share will soon realise they’ll need to have their technology talking with each other. Whilst practice management software platforms have been notoriously difficult in not sharing access with other technology (like CRMs), the market is changing.
Law firms that want to get on the front foot seek our expertise in determining API access before they integrate technology, it’s as simple as that. There could be no worse thing your law firm can do in 2020, then integrate and deploy technology that has a closed API and hampers your ability to connect the dots with key pieces of technology that you may wish to instigate now or in the future.
We can assist your law firm in all facets of API integration.
Client Portals
In the last 6 months, we have designed and deployed a number of portals with the objective of keeping clients and referral sources very close. We think of these portals as ecosystems and in our view are possibly the most important thing your law firm can do to engender client and referral source loyalty.
Talk to us today about how we can help your law firm with the design and development of an ecosystem strategy and client portals.
Event Planning & Marketing for Law Firms
Without a doubt, a key objective of any marketing strategy worth its salt is to cultivate existing referral networks and to this extent, events can be tremendously valuable.
The perennial issue for law firms in this respect is the difficulty in treating the opportunity holistically from a marketing perspective.
Consider an employment law practice for employers. The firm wants to engage its current business clients and encourage other business owners to attend that aren’t yet clients.
A well-developed event planning and marketing strategy will traverse topics like:
- how can we partner with allied professionals to widen our net and expose our practice to their clients?;
- what is the key messaging that will attract these clients?
- what marketing collateral do we require to drive engagement pre and post the event?
- what assistance do we require to ensure our slide deck is synergistic with our brand?
- what audio-visual equipment do we require to record the presentation to open up other content creation and syndication possibilities?
- what are those possibilities and who will execute them fully?
- is there a blue ocean strategy that could be entertained in the staging of this event that will grow market share?
These are some of the aspects law firms should be considered in the context of event planning and marketing.
At Fast Firms, we can assist your law firm with every aspect of the foregoing.
Video Production and Marketing
Video has now become commonplace for most progressive law firms. Moreover, COVID19 has made spontaneous video much more acceptable given the significant rise in client consultation being facilitated through video-conferencing equipment.
At Fast Firms, video is somewhat of an essential feature if you’re firm believes both in content engagement and omnichannel marketing.
The former begins with a content planning strategy of which key content topics are identified and planned accordingly. During the delegation, consideration needs to be focussed on the best medium to deliver the message. If the content is early-stage and lengthy, video may not be the answer. Conversely, if late-stage, with a strong call to action from good talent within your legal practice, you can’t beat it.
Law firms in our experience spend too much time considering the technology as opposed to delivering the message. That said, despite COVID19 making video much more acceptable, be very conscious of your brand and also the fact that you will be judged by your video. If your lawyer is inarticulate and a little incoherent and the video has been done on an iPhone without professional audio, it’s likely you’ll lose more client than you will win. Just because everyone is using their iPhone doesn’t necessarily mean that your law firm should.
At Fast Firms, we provide full production and editing of video using the very best audio and lighting equipment. We also encourage firms to use their iPhones when coupled with recommended audio and lighting equipment.
Talk to us today about Law Firm Video Production & Marketing.
Photography for Law Firms
If you’re a law firm that doesn’t care too much about how you’re presented to a competitive market than you’re hunting for a cheap and cheerful photographer will be perfect.
Photography is a key brand and marketing touchpoint and its importance is underpinned by the fact that if you’re like every law firm we work with, the most sought after page on a law firm’s website are the bio pages.
In conjunction with bio photography, do consider if on brand, the opportunity of having candid, in-action shots done as well. This will allow your firm to have plenty of scope if you desire to build out marketing collateral, particularly on-boarding documents and capability statements. Over and above this, they’re just great for inclusion in targeted social campaigns as well.
At Fast Firms, we have a panel of photographers that we use exclusively and are very reluctant to utilise others.
Talk to us today about Law Firm Photography.
Outdoor Advertising for Law Firms
Inexperienced agencies will often poke fun at the lunacy of the value of outdoor advertising, particularly billboards. But again, dependent upon your strategy, outdoor advertising can and does augment well with targeted brand awareness campaigns. The issue in our experience is less about the medium, but more about ascertaining the return on investment of outdoor advertising.
There are sophisticated ways of measuring ROI to an extent and this involves either running board only phone numbers (preferably 6 digits easy to recall) and working with outdoor signage companies that have the capacity to embed digital marketing campaigns in association with their digital boards. The technology these days is such that a static or digital billboard, a train or bus campaign, has the capacity to re-engage and retarget your specific billboard audience and increase brand interaction.
At Fast Firms, we design all your outdoor advertising needs and work seamlessly with the big players like oOH, Bishop and others in every state of Australia.
Talk to us today about Law Firm Billboards & Outdoor Advertising.
Google Reviews for Law Firms
Google Reviews for law firms have become increasingly important, not only from a client acquisition perspective but we have seen a clear relationship between ranking results and positive reviews.
It goes without saying that if your law firm does not have Google reviews in your law firm marketing strategy, you need to. That said, one of the big issues for law firms is how they request such a review, followed by instructing a happy client how to do it.
We have literally increased Google reviews for law firms a hundredfold with a set methodology.
This emanates from getting granular on the client journey for each specific practice area and knowing at which point a request for a review will garner the best results. Sure, at most times it’s at the close of a matter with a trigger activating an automation in the CRM that not only requests a review but makes it very easy for the client to give such a review.
At Fast Firms, we spent ages trying to find a piece of technology that would make the latter easy. Consequently, we couldn’t find one, so we built one ourselves. Our technology has literally helped law firms go from zero reviews to 50 within the space of weeks.
Long story short, if you haven’t considered the importance of Google reviews amid your marketing mix, you need to as a matter of priority.
Emerging Technology for Law Firms
Your law firm has to have an active radar when it comes to emerging technology. In this context, we’re not talking AI or blockchain (though we can), we’re simply talking about technology that does two things. Firstly, in streamlines the nexus between the front and back of house and secondly and most importantly, it enhances the client-journey. If your law firm isn’t worried about these things you should be.
Typically when working with law firms on technology adoption we phrase it through a lens of horizons. We learnt this through former Telstra CEO Ziggy Switkowski who allegedly contextualised strategy through a series of horizons.
Practically speaking, in our work with a very successful diverse practice law firm who have always been on the front-foot of technology adoption, it helped step-change the consideration of technology adoption and integration by delineating between horizon one, two and three. For this firm, horizon one was the adoption of technology that helped them understand the data the firm sat on and what it said about the nurture of key referral relationships. Horizon two is about building out technology ecosystems to further deepen those relationships and Horizon three is marked as the execution of technology that streamlines the provision of legal services that may leverage productised services and automations.
The bottom line is your law firm needs to be thinking of these things. At Fast Firms, we can not only assist your firm in acting as your radar but of course both the strategic work and the subsequent choice and integration of the technology.
Talk to us today about Technology Integrations.
Analytics & Data for Law Firms
It goes without saying that without sophisticated analytics and data set under your law firm’s key digital assets and marketing campaigns, you’re flying blind.
The flagship product for digital, of course, is Google Analytics (GA) and it’s free. That’s the good news, but setting the dashboard up to make better sense of the effect of your law firm marketing isn’t for the faint-hearted. It will require your law firm, preferably during the strategy and design phase to be considering with your agency the key goals and conversion points that need to punctuate your assets and campaigns that are feeding data into GA. In this context, you will also need to integrate Google Tag manager and set up triggers.
Now what you’ll find once this work is done, is that the data set may fall short, particularly if you’re wanting to run a thorough and comprehensive data analysis, you will need to consider a suite of third-party dashboards. This is very important if your law firm has multiple lead channels like LiveChat, Chatbots, Phone Calls, Website Forms etc because you will want to assess the data holistically. Sure, there is a good degree of time spent doing this at the outset, but once done, your law firm will have the luxury of having data for every lead channel which will make it considerably easier to assess it.
On-Demand Law Firm Marketing
We’d hate to be the bearer of bad news, but when it comes to law firm marketing and technology, things do go wrong. Now, this may sound a little contrarian, but ensuring things keep rolling doesn’t work with a set and forget web design, marketing agency. Sure, it may be attractive to not be contracted over a period of time, but in our experience, you will likely regret it. For example, if your website is running off WordPress, the repetitious updates to the technology can have a major impact on your website design and functionality.
With that said, we’re excited to announce Fast Firms On-Demand, which will allow your law firm to get a wide array of work done when you need it, without being on a contract or in fact, even if you have never been a client of Fast Firms.
Here are some examples of work you can access via Fast Firms On-Demand:
- website updates;
- fix broken website pages;
- add new website pages or remove them;
- add or remove team members from your website;
- design new websites;
- do any graphic design work you need;
- do any marketing work you require;
- run Google Ads and/or Facebook Ad campaigns;
- design, build and deploy chatbots;
- design, build and deploy automated documents;
- and many other services
The list literally goes on and on. You can access Fast Firms On-Demand here.
Phone On-Hold Messaging
Looking at every marketing touchpoint holistically is one of the most important things you can do for your law firm. One that is often missed is that period of time when a potential or existing client is on-hold. This time is valuable and allows law firms to engage and illuminate practice areas that your existing or potential client is oblivious to.
In considering the script, we recommend a blend of informative content relating to practice areas but inject attributes of your brand personality as well.
At Fast Firms, we take care of the script, the production and working with your phone system provider on the integration.
Law Firm Intranets
At Fast Firms, we designed and built our own Intranet technology close to 10 years ago and have recently updated the platform significantly. The reason why law firms of 10 lawyers upwards should be considering an intranet is because important things get lost. In this context, we’re just not talking about just documents, but we’re talking more so about the key assets that keep your lawyers and other staff up to date on internal practices, events etc as well as internal comms generally.
If your law firm is looking to overlay the objectives of an Intranet with a robust internal comms tool, slack works great.
Talk to Us About Law Firm Intranets
Important Things to Consider
It goes without saying that if you have read this guide from front to back, it’s likely you have come to the realisation that effective law firm marketing traverses multiple facets of brand, design, marketing and technology. Most importantly, in making a decision of your next steps you need to be informed by a strategy that derives from your law firm’s current or intended brand positioning. This is fundamentally the most important piece of work because everything else emanates from it. If you gloss over this work, after growing law firms for over 10 years, we can guarantee that you will flounder, wasting time and money, only to return to this point in the future because all has failed.
The success of your law firm marketing will not pull from one singular activity or function, but rather multiple. For this reason, your choice of agency is very important because you will need one that has a copious amount of experience working in the legal industry across the full continuum of brand, design, marketing and technology.
At Fast Firms, we work with law firms of all sizes in all locations throughout the World.