Business and marketing: a match made in heaven?

In the notoriously hectic life of the professional, there is little time to spare at the best of times and marketing is the first and most likely area to suffer from neglect. Aidan Cullen, senior marketing manager at Allied Irish Bank (GB) advises on bringing together business and marketing strategies to reap great benefits for your firm.

Tough Deadlines? Demanding clients? Pressure to bring in new business? Sound familiar? It’s all too easy to get caught up in the ‘here and now’ due to continuous client liaison, billing and paperwork taking up so much time. This is why raising your company profile and attracting new business is sometimes not seen as a priority by many professionals.

A polished plaque on the front door can no longer be relied on to successfully grow the business. In a world where there is immense pressure on all fee earners to bring in more and more business as well as making sure existing clients are happy the pressure can quickly mount, the long-term health of a legal firm can suffer unless staff ‘step back’ and take a broader view of the landscape within which their business operates.

It is integral to the future success of the legal firm that the marketing strategy is considered in all business decisions taken. Allied Irish Bank has a great deal of experience with legal clients and a wide knowledge of the market environment. Here are a few suggestions about current best practice and some simple steps to ensure that your business plan and marketing strategy can combine to be a key factor in the long-term health of a firm.

It is imperative that the marketing objectives of a firm are formulated alongside a firm’s business plan. Drafting a business plan involves extensive research into your target audiences, and competitors. Market research will establish the demands of your target audience, so that you can develop a strategy which gives out your key messages effectively. The first step in uniting the business and marketing strategies of a legal firm is information sharing, from the very first step, and utilising the specialist knowledge of the different areas of business. Through this kind of communication a firm can develop a clear, well-rounded business and a highly effective business plan.

Often professional services firms, such as legal firms can be very ‘functionally’ focused, the results of the fee earners being made clear throughout the firm, and other staff activities can become overshadowed. In this kind of environment it can be easy to forget the importance of the research and strategies, and their importance to the overall success of a firm.

From the start, the business value of the marketing team must be seen and understood across the board. This recognition can be assured in many ways, for example, by ensuring that a results-driven marketing team can provide tangible results, and raise awareness of their activity and their achievements. Regular meetings and reports ensure that crucial information that can affect the entire firm is clearly explained and understood. Internal communication through staff newsletters and bulletins highlighting business news as well as marketing news is also an effective method of updating the firm.

Also crucial to the business success of a legal firm is understanding throughout, and at all levels, of the marketing strategies deployed. This should become a point of focus in the every day business conducted by the legal staff in the firm. Legal professionals with day to day contact with clients, who are mainly the first point of contact for potential new business and it is important that they are fully up to date on the firm’s marketing objectives. Are these professionals all giving out the same agreed key messages consistently, to clients who will potentially be in contact with one another? Are they targeting the right kind of client? How far do they understand the services launched by their competitors and ways in which they can assert their own firm’s authority in the light of this knowledge? All of these questions must be considered if a legal firm is to appear professional amongst peers.

One highly effective method by which these key marketing and new business messages can be consolidated throughout a firm is the introduction of staff communications panels. These will ideally consist of a panel of selected high level management from both the legal and marketing departments, who meet regularly to discuss developments. This way, if key management figures are well informed and up to date on strategies, they can feed this information back to their teams effectively and incorporate them into developing plans. Both departments must take the objectives of the other into consideration, ensuring that there are no mixed messages being passed down to the team members. If methods such as these are employed, the goal of a concise, tightly run joint exercise between the marketing and legal divisions of a firm can be achieved.

Rupa Dhoot, Marketing Director of Iliffes Booth Bennett Solicitors, with whom Allied Irish Bank (GB) work closely, said;

“I personally attend all of the Partners and Group Head Meetings, ensuring all parties are fully aware of the firm’s objectives. This direct involvement allows me to influence and lead the firm’s activities, which will create door-opening opportunities. It is essential to ensure that a marketing culture is developed for all members of the firm from the managing Partner to the receptionist.”

Rupa feels that it is also vital to build firm alliances with third parties, such as IBB’s relationship with Allied Irish Bank (GB), with whom there are obvious synergies and working together and maintaining strong relationships will be of mutual benefit to both firms.

Both marketing and new business development are areas that can easily be developed through every day client liaison by legal professionals provided the key messages are correctly fed to them. The Marketing Director of a legal partnership cab also act as an internal, ensuring that client needs are clearly addressed and that changes in the marketplace are highlighted to all. Also, the introduction of an incentive scheme for those who bring in new business through a personal contact, can be a great way to ensure involvement at all levels, as well as being a great boost to staff morale!

In addition to educating legal professionals in the importance and outcomes of marketing strategies, it is equally important to ensure that the marketing team has a clear understanding of the business objectives of the firm. This way the department can work effectively, pinpointing their key target client base where they can focus their resources more effectively to raise the firm’s profile and create business development opportunities from a more effective platform. Inclusion of marketing team members in business strategy meetings is always essential, as is the inclusion of legal professionals in marketing meetings and brainstorms, to give their professional opinion on strategies being developed. It is just as important for legal professionals to speak out if they feel such a campaign would be ineffective. They add value to one another by drawing on each other’s expertise, such as knowledge of their client base, and the marketing team’s knowledge of their competitor’s strategy and approach. From this an airtight strategy can be formed. The marketing team will need to have a strong awareness of who a firm’s competitors are, so that they can keep up with any developments they may need to respond to in their campaigns.

One method of raising awareness of your firm’s attributes to a key target audience is attending and being involved in seminars. The best way a firm can achieve this is by working with the marketing team to identify a handful of media-trained key legal spokespeople who can attend professional conferences and seminars. Whether they are attending as speakers at the seminar, or running workshops or symposia they can reach a large number of the firm’s key target audience.

When working with the marketing department on this, the legal team not only need to identify confident and knowledgeable speakers, who can be easily trained in dealing with the press, they should also consolidate what they would like to focus on as their specialist area. This way when attending seminars they will gain the reputation of being particularly experienced in this area of law and establish the firm as an authority in this field. Press conferences surrounding a seminar are also an effective method of building relationships with key legal journalists, as the speakers can meet them face to face and personally answer any queries the journalist may have, rather than simply being a faceless voice at the end of the telephone.

Whenever we interact with the marketplace we are marketing our firm and we need to recognise in this interaction the opportunities to raise the profile of the firm and the potential to develop new business. This is why the integration of a marketing plan with a business plan can be more effective in achieving strong growth targets.

Aiden Cullen is senior marketing manager for Allied Irish Bank. For further information, please contact Kate Sattelle at Grayling Public Relations at kate.sattelle@grayling.co.uk