There are 7 danger signs that show you are not doing your marketing well enough. Here they are:
1. Your sales (or contracts) are driven by price
2. Clients cannot distinguish your service from that of your competitors
3. You use disconnected sales gimmicks
4. You do not have a unified plan for delivering the message of your services to clients
5. Most sales leads come from your sales staff
6. Longtime clients say, “I didn’t know you offered that service.”
7. You do not have a client database
If any (or some) of these danger signs characterize your legal business, it is time for you to market the correct way, and that means Guerrilla Marketing.
Just as no one goes to war without first planning how to attack, Guerrilla Marketing is never done without a plan. Your plan needs to be written down and not merely thought up in the mind. If you think you do not need to write it down, consider what the famous Chinese sage Confucius said, “The faintest ink is stronger than the clearest memory”. There’s a lot of wisdom in that short saying.
So take out a pen and paper and put on your thinking cap. It’s now time to formulate your Guerrilla Marketing Plan.
Your Guerrilla Marketing Plan must answer 7 fundamental questions:
1. What is the purpose of your marketing? This refers to the exact action that you want your potential clients to take when they are exposed to your marketing. Do you want them to fill up a form, call a toll-free number, click through to visit your Website, give you their email address, tell a friend about your services or some other thing?
2. How will you achieve this purpose? Here is where you unique selling point (USP), your competitive advantage and the benefits you offer come in.
3. Who are your target market(s)? Without knowing this you will never determine the correct position for your business.
4. What marketing weapons (advertising methods) will you use?
5. What is your niche and the position you will adopt?
6. What is the identity of your legal business?
7. What is your marketing budget in terms of a percentage of your gross revenue? In 2006, the national average spent on marketing by US firms was 4% of gross revenue.
Once you can answer these questions for your business, you can draft out your marketing plan in one paragraph.
Consider the marketing plan for a business called Freedom Press that sells books about freelancing. This is how they state their marketing plan according to the 7 questions above:
1. What is your purpose of marketing?
The purpose of Freedom Press is to motivate people to order the book online or by mail so as to sell the maximum number of books at the lowest possible selling cost per book.
2. How will you achieve this purpose?
This will be accomplished by positioning the books as being so valuable to freelancers that they are guaranteed to be worth more to the reader than their selling price.
3. Who are your target markets?
The target market will be people who are or plan to be engaged in freelance earning activities.
4. What marketing weapons will you use?
The marketing tools we plan to use include classified ads in magazines, newspapers and online; direct mail, sales at seminars, publicity on magazines, radio and television; direct sales calls to bookstores, mail order display ads in magazines, weekly postings on online bulletin boards oriented to freelancers, emails to known freelancers and a Website that links to others that serve freelancers.
5. What is your niche and position you will adopt?
The niche that Freedom Press occupies is a business that provides valuable information for freelancers.
6. What is the identity of your business?
Our identity will be one of expertise, readability and a quick response to customer requests.
7. What is your marketing budget in terms of percentage of gross revenue?
30% of sales will be allocated to marketing.
Notice the characteristics of a marketing plan like the one above. Firstly, it is deceptively simple. It does not go into details. The simpler it is, the easier it will be to explain to your staff and for them to follow. Secondly, it clearly identifies the target market which provides the framework for creating the advertising. The marketing plan should establish the type of media to use and the cost to be incurred. Thirdly, because it is so simple, your marketing plan should not be given to a lot of flexibility. Your plan is to be followed. Once implemented, stick to it.
For flexibility, you can expand on your marketing plan by including further details such as alternative courses of action for contingencies, a list of objectives and priorities, monitoring methods, possible problems that may arise and responsibilities allocated to staff members. However, these expansion details are add-ons. They are luxuries not essentials; so do not get bogged down in planning them. Get down to the work of actual marketing.
