Most people who intend to do their own marketing start off with the best intentions. They’ll often begin the marketing process in earnest. Unfortunately, they’ll just as often lack two things; a) the deep knowledge of what works and doesn’t work in the ever changing digital marketing landscape, and b) they lack the time requisite to learn and execute an effective digital marketing strategy on a regular basis.

After all, you have a full time job already. It’s simply too much to think you can learn how to be a full marketer in addition to running your firm.

When you hire Array Law, it’s a “done for you” service. We do all the heavy lifting, and will only require your feedback and approval on some pieces before we publish them. Let us focus on your marketing so you can focus on running your firm.

Many law firms, especially newer ones, “focus” on a collection of practice areas that is really the sum of all the practice areas that each partner has some level of expertise in. But as a firm, do you really want to offer a little bit of this and a little bit of that, with no unified message? Or would you rather express profound expertise in a few areas that clearly indicate you’re the best in those areas?

So the first step is to define which practice areas you’ll focus on. Any that are secondary, put them to the side for now and focus on your primary practice areas. Once you do that, when prospective clients consider you they’ll either conclude that you are perfect for them, or they’ll conclude just the opposite because they’re looking for something else. If you’re not perfect for everyone then that’s ok. It’s actually a great thing because you want to be a perfect fit to help with the problems of your ideal clients.

Once your practice areas are well defined, and it’s clear who you are a fit for and who is a fit for you, then all of your marketing material should focus exclusively on satisfying that ideal client’s problems.

To reiterate, you will be excluding people who are non-ideal clients because you’d much rather have ideal clients. That will only happen if you don’t water down your message by trying to be everything to everyone.

You and your firm are unique, and your marketing strategy must be unique to reflect that.

Although many marketing tactics such as having a website, running online ads, and leveraging SEO techniques will be used by other firms, when working with Array Law your marketing strategy and its implementation will be unique to highlight your firm’s uniqueness.

We never refer to ourselves as vendors. We are our clients’ partners. We’re in this together, and we will be in this side-by-side with you daily.

You will have close and constant contact with our team. You will receive a dedicated account manager who will check in with you regularly, find out what’s changing in your firm, communicate our marketing strategies, wins, and opportunities to you, and they’ll pull in our digital marketing strategists as needed to ensure every concern and question you have is answered in as great of details as you care to understand.

Like you, we are in this to win this. You can’t get that from a vendor.

Most agencies simply start doing, and spend little to no time strategizing what they should be doing first.

Here’s what typically happens … You hire someone, usually a local agency or “guy” who works with all sorts of businesses, you pay their invoices, they do stuff, but you can’t really tell if it’s working or not. Then you’re worried about cutting them because, well, what if the stuff they’re doing is kind of working? But what part is working? You’re not sure, and they just do seem to have the ability to tell you or soothe your concerns.

Sound familiar?

We hear this a lot from prospective clients.

Here at Array Digital, we start every client partnership with a kickoff meeting with you and our digital marketing specialists. There we discuss your firm, your goals, and where you want to be in a year or more. That meeting, and conversations/emails/text messages afterwards, are the input into your digital marketing strategy. Our strategy is a written document that we will deliver, review with you, and execute against.

We have several core values that we hire, fire, and promote against. Transparency is one of those core values that’s pertinent to communicating with you about exactly how we’re performing for you.

You will receive a marketing report from us showing what’s working, what’s not, and explaining where and how we’re going to make adjustments. It could be that the strategy needs to be tweaked, or the execution needs to be enhanced. No matter why, we’ll make those changes and hold ourselves accountable to not only you, but to ourselves.

But first, you’re going to have to commit. By committing we mean that you need to dedicate some time, some resources and funding, to stage a meaningful enough marketing campaign to go up against some possibly formidable competitors in your practice areas and geographic areas.

If you have the ability to fully commit to reach this goal, we will create a digital marketing strategy that will ensure you rise to the top, and are known as one of the top law firms in your area.

In business, it’s not always the most qualified company that wins. Often best known beats best when it comes to earning new clients.

For this reason, only doing quality work and relying on referrals is simply inadequate to get the types of cases that you want. While some firms languish quietly waiting for a referral or two, there are a handful of other law firms that actively pursue new business development in addition to passively hoping a referral comes in. You should do both—earn business from referrals and develop new business from marketing.

That one-two combination is what sets some law firms apart from the masses, gets them the cases they want, and helps them to provide the high level of service and fees desired.

Most law firms do good work and rely on referrals. That’s great, until it’s not great.

In order to be able to confidentially project new cases, new business, and the necessary hiring you’ll need to keep ahead of demand, you need more than just referrals. You need to be exposed beyond your network, which likely is not significantly larger than the network of competing law firms.

This is where marketing, digital marketing in particular, can set you apart from all the rest.

Think of the last time you searched for something. Some sort of product or service. How did you go about researching it?

Chances are very high that you Googled for a solution to your problem. This pertains to almost any offering, including to law firms.

The key is to show up online, to show up when people are looking for someone like you, to show up in many different places over time, and of course to have a stellar reputation.

Here’s how most people, most of the time, search for and hire a law firm like yours.

• They google for your practice area. They may append “near me” to the end of their search. 
• They review search results—the paid ads, the local results, and the “organic” results that come from SEO. The more places you show up on the first page, the higher the likelihood that you’ll catch their attention.
• Once they find a result they’re interested in, they’ll click through and review the website.
• A small percentage of your visitors will call you or submit your Contact Us form on their first visit. But most will leave your website without contacting you so they can continue to research other firms, or they may get distracted by life. Once they leave, if you’re not proactive then they can very quickly forget you even exist.
• Since they went to your website, and have a smart marketing team like Array Law behind you, your ad will start showing up for your website visitors on social media like Facebook and Instagram. Since most people spend three hours a day on social media, they’ll see your “retargeting ad” immediately and many times over the next several days or weeks, depending on your practice area and digital marketing strategy.
• As they’re reminded of you, they may sign up for your newsletter to find out more about you. They will likely read your online reviews in places like Google and Facebook. They will likely ask a friend if they’ve heard of you.
• When multiple sources all point back to you as someone they should check out then they’ll come back to your website and take action to contact you.

Knowing how most people buy most of the time is critical to setting up your marketing strategy. The more places you show up, and in a timely targeted fashion, the more likely it is that they’ll give you a shot and reach out to find out more. 

You have to be in the game to win the game. Play the game with a winning marketing team by your side, you and will win the game.