In a recent post, Erika Steinberg asked her LinkedIn audience if they’d achieved their marketing goals for 2023. Stacy Thal, a fantastic brand strategist, had an excellent question – if you’re halfway through the year and have no marketing plan, where should you begin? Let’s answer that in more detail.
It all starts with defining what’s urgent vs. what’s important.
One thing that prevents law firms (and probably everyone else) from making marketing plans is the constant need to keep up with urgent marketing tasks that have to happen now – like sharing news on social media, keeping up with email marketing, providing information to prospective clients, and responding to media inquiries. This takes up a lot of in-house marketing staff’s time. And when lawyers handle their own marketing, it’s even more of a struggle for them to squeeze these tasks into their everyday legal work.
Urgent work can crowd out other important tasks – like analyzing revenue reports to understand where to focus, checking your email marketing and website analytics, and evaluating marketing software. You don’t have to do any of these right away, but these actions can really move the needle for your firm.
Think about those “I wish we could do this” goals that are easily put off for another day. If you could achieve just one marketing goal to help your firm or practice this year, what would it be?
It could just be the first step in a larger project. Spend five or ten minutes thinking of the first things you need to do to make progress on that. Once you know what they are, add the first action item to your calendar or task list and get started.
Now you have a marketing plan. But instead of a big project that seems like it will take more time than you have, you have manageable steps small enough to squeeze in between the urgent things. Starting small is so much better than not starting at all.
Feeling lost about which first steps to take? Let’s chat about what can help you move the needle now.
