Attracting new clients is one of the most profitable things you can do for your law firm, and it can be achieved with good marketing strategies. However, many legal practices are unable to gain new leads and clients because of unfocused or generic strategies, and their conventional approach can make it more difficult to reach their target audience.
If you’re looking for new ways to promote your legal practice, why not employ right-to-left thinking? This out-of-the-box approach to legal practice marketing opens up a wealth of potential opportunities and helps you to stand out from the competition. Keep reading to learn more.
What is right-to-left thinking?
When you examine most processes in various industries, they move in a horizontal manner. Let’s take building a new house as an example. This process starts with project design and planning, then materials procurement, then the actual building stage, before ending with post-construction work. However, many people fail to consider how the horizontal process flows.
In the example we created above, the process starts from left to right. We start with planning, then execution, then the final result. This workflow is suitable because the final result is already predetermined and there aren’t a lot of factors that could change it. However, this model does not work for many other industries, especially in matters like marketing.
A better substitute is right-to-left thinking. In a pop-culture context, this is called reverse engineering. Instead of planning what you’re going to build, you’re going to focus on the final result and work your way backwards — a right-to-left flow. This allows you to define your goals at the outset and plan what you need to do to reach them.
The more difficult part is determining how right you want to go. In marketing, increasing your leads up to a certain percentage may be enough as a goal. The other end of the spectrum may be gaining 50 new clients within a certain time period for your law firm. Whatever your goal may be, you’ll need to be certain of it to create the most comprehensive plan.
Examples of right-to-left thinking in law firm marketing
Establishing trust and a good reputation
One of the biggest goals for law firms is to become a trusted practice that many people will recommend or refer to those who are facing a case. This could be your end-goal. Of course, becoming a reputable legal office is usually achieved by decisively winning your cases. However, marketing can also help you build your reputation, and it’s much easier to structure a plan for marketing than just relying on winning lawsuits.
By thinking from right-to-left, some law firms can easily backtrack in their strategy to establish customer reputation. They know their goal, so their teams can allocate resources for creating educational content, informative posts, glowing testimonials and other indicators of their authority and knowledge in their practice areas.
Gain more leads through social media pages
Getting more leads may be something that’s usually associated in other industries, but these are also essential in legal firms. It’s how they can find prospective clients that might eventually convert into consultations. In left-to-right thinking, legal firms will usually just think of the tools that they have at their disposal — in this case, social media — to gain as many leads as they can.
However, some practices use a right-to-left process. These firms first determine how many leads they want to gain and work leftwards from there. This means creating a reliable lead-generation pipeline that delivers exactly the numbers they’re aiming for while using resources efficiently.
Increase SEO ranking in the next six months
Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is the process of improving your website and content to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Being among the first to appear when a user has a query on Google, Yahoo, or Safari improves your visibility, enhances conversion rates and establishes you as a trusted legal practice. It’s not surprising that ranking high in SERPs is one of the biggest goals in law firm marketing.
Law firms that use right-to-left thinking already know that good SEO takes time, so they’ve created strategies to reach their goals in a set period. That way, they won’t waste their resources and can adjust their strategies should the current one not work based on projections. This can entail reprioritising roles, repurposing content and even working with new partners.
Applying right-to-left thinking for your law firm
Here are some definitive steps you can try when applying the right-to-left process to your marketing efforts:
1. Determine your starting point
This circles back to the point we made earlier about knowing how far to the right you want to get. In legal firms, the farthest to the right that you can go in terms of marketing is gaining new clients. However, there are many other goals that you can accomplish incrementally before reaching this final objective. Choosing one of these smaller goals will help you focus on the next steps, which include data gathering.
2. Gather data
How much labour, time and other resources are available for you to accomplish your goal? What resources do you need to reach your objective? To answer these questions, you need to gather data about what you currently have. This is the information you’ll use to analyse your capabilities and create your strategy.
3. Analyse and plan
With the data in your hands, you can create a feasible plan that allows you to reach your predetermined goal. Use the information to gain more insight into what you have available and what ways you can use these resources and strategies for your marketing plan.
Need help with law firm marketing?
Right-to-left thinking helps you become more efficient in reaching your marketing goals. Since you already have the end-result in mind, you can reverse-engineer your plan. This allows you to use what’s available and make adjustments as needed to your resources or workflow.
This process can be complex, and you might need the help of experts to change how you go about achieving your goals. Thankfully, we can assist you with your law firm marketing needs. Contact us today and let’s have a chat.
TBD is an agency that helps marketing, recruitment and management teams to successfully position law firms in the UK market and beyond. If you have any queries, please get in touch: simon.marshall@tbdmarketing.co.uk.
