Sue Bramall's blogs

Law firms and cause-related marketing
Sue Bramall
Tuesday, 18 June 2013

To most people CRM stands for ‘client relationship marketing’ and is a vitally important topic I have written about on a number of times. There is another lesser-known CRM, which stands for ‘cause-related marketing’, which is about connecting one organisation with a non-profit organisation or charity for the purposes of mutual benefit. That connection may be used to support a cause financially, in kind or by helping to raise awareness.

A well-known example of cause-related marketing is the MoonWalk in London, which raises money for breast cancer treatment and research. We took the opportunity to participate this year as part of a staff team event, and I met many other lawyers who were entering or had done so in the past. The MoonWalk has a very successful partnership with Wonderbra, with each participant receiving a free sample – it was a great way to get 15,000 people to try one of their products. On a similar, albeit smaller local scale, a law firm may give away branded T-shirts at a fun run in aid of a local charity, and many firms support cash-strapped local sports clubs with donations of kit. All these activities raise the profile of your firm’s name with the participants and their families.

More often than not though, lawyers can really help through providing their time and expertise to a good cause, with many solicitors acting as trustees and advisers to a wide range of organisations.

One such example of legal advice to a good cause which dropped through my email box was the notice that ‘11 Top lawyers tell high-street shops to “lose the lads’ mags” - supermarkets and newsagents open to legal action from staff and customers’. This piqued my curiosity, as I have often wondered when it became legal for what I considered to be top-shelf stuff to be displayed at all, never mind at the same level as sweets – child’s eye level. A quick check on the website today revealed that 17 lawyers are now backing this advice.

In any contentious campaign, there are two sides to every argument and so putting your head above the parapet may also attract a share of negative comment online. (I suspect we might get more than the normal number of ‘anonymous’ blog contributions on this particular topic!)

The third piece of good cause-related marketing that caught my eye this week was a notice regarding the Anglo-American Symposium on Diversity and Inclusion in the Legal Profession, which is running two events in Birmingham on 24 July and in London on 26 July. The members of this organisation may not see their activities as cause-related marketing, but their activities will bring together other like-minded and forward-thinking people and an opportunity to build relationships.

All cause-related marketing increases your exposure to a potentially broader audience that supports the chosen cause. It provides an opportunity to meet new people and connect on an area of mutual interest. It can be a particularly useful way for young lawyers to start building their network and developing broader commercial experience. It is also personally very satisfying when you can help a particular cause make positive progress.

There is such a broad range of cause-related marketing opportunities out there that there really is something for everyone.

Sue Bramall is managing director of Berners Marketing and advises law firms in the UK and overseas

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Law firms’ marketing plans
Sue Bramall
Wednesday, 15 May 2013

I get to see a wide range of solicitors’ marketing plans ranging from the weighty dissertation to the single sheet.

Personally, I favour concise marketing plans for law firms as otherwise they tend to sit on a shelf and gather dust. However one that is too short may lack the essential SMART marketing objectives that mean it will bear fruit. The latest edition of the Law Society Lexcel practice management standard requires a firm to develop a marketing plan which must include: ‘measurable objectives for the next 12 months’. Being ‘measurable’ is an important step towards a SMART marketing plan. By SMART, we mean specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely.

By way of example, compare these objectives: ‘Raise profile locally’ with ‘Generate at least one mention in local press each month’. ‘Grow automotive business’ with ‘Win £50,000 of new business from automotive sector in the next 12 months’. ‘Improve average rates’ with ‘Increase average hourly achieved rate from £195 per hour to £210 per hour over 18 months’. In each example it is easy to tell whether or not you have achieved the second objective within a certain time frame. If you have not then, you can examine why not and adjust your law firm’s marketing strategy for the following year.

One area where solicitors’ marketing plans can be lacking in detail is in specifying target markets. For your marketing expenditure to have maximum impact, it is necessary to know where to focus it. Once you have a clear definition of your target market, it becomes much easier to assess marketing opportunities and decide whether or not to pursue them. With regard to private clients, you will usually be able to define this by geographic catchment area (time or distance from your office), by socio-economic profile, and other factors. For example, you may narrow your focus on business owners, certain foreign-language speakers or by stage of life, such as young family or retirees.

For business clients, in addition to specifying a catchment area, company size (by turnover or number of employees) you may wish to focus on a particular industry or corporate structure such as partnership or charities. It is possible to be much more specific by researching and detail the names of top target companies.

In addition to the firm-wide marketing plan, it may also be appropriate to drill down and develop plans for practice areas or sectors. You may even wish to consider introducing personal business development plans. If so, it is important that each sub-plan follows a consistent format to enable comparison. Such plans will also need to be reviewed from above to identify opportunities for co-ordination and economies of scale.

The six-monthly review recommended by Lexcel is important to keep activities and budgets on track, and to maintain momentum over the year.

Sue Bramall is managing director of Berners Marketing and advises law firms in the UK and overseas

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Law firm marketing essentials
Sue Bramall
Wednesday, 24 April 2013

With increased competition and tough economic conditions set to continue for the foreseeable future, how can you plan for growth in your law firm? There are essentially four sources of potential new business which need to be explored.

First, look at marketing more of your current legal services to existing clients. This should be the easiest, but too often the information available within a firm does not make a gap analysis easy to perform. For example, recent budget announcements may provide inheritance tax planning opportunities for wealthier private clients.

But, how easy is it to identify these from the thousands of clients that you have written wills for? How good is the firm at selling private client services to the directors of your business clients? Given that most of your business clients probably have a website, how many have come to you for their online terms? A systematic approach to cross-selling can pay the quickest dividends.

Second, you can market new legal services to existing clients. Have you identified a need amongst your clients which is not currently being met? Once you have found a solution to meeting that need, (via training, recruitment or a joint venture) you will need to plan a similar systematic approach to communicating this opportunity to your current client base.

Third, look at marketing your existing legal services to new clients. Start by looking at your current client base to see if you can attract ‘more of the same’. Then consider how you can attract new markets – for example if your private client base is elderly, what can you do to attract young families? If your business clients are mainly in manufacturing, can you attract technology or service companies?

Finally, there is the option to launch a new service to a new market. This would be the costliest and riskiest option, but occasionally an interesting opportunity can arise in this way and needs to be considered on its merits.

Whilst the first two options are the most logical routes to start along, we find that in practice it is harder for firms to access accurate client information than it is to call the local paper and book an advertisement.

There is a danger in neglecting your current clients, as they may well be members of the Co-op and RAC and purchasers of Saga holidays – companies whose marketing departments will undoubtedly have excellent client information systems. Each of these potential routes to growth can be explored and planned for, despite difficult times.

And as the saying goes ‘failure to plan, is planning to fail’.

Sue Bramall is managing director of Berners Marketing and advises law firms in the UK and overseas

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Holes in your client experience?
Sue Bramall
Thursday, 7 March 2013

Whatever your marketing budget, it is important to ensure that every enquiry is handled efficiently and effectively in order to maximise the proportion which are converted to an instruction.

An enquiry can pass through many parts of your firm (website, reception, secretaries and other lawyers) before reaching the appropriate person. It will also pass through the phases of an explanation of circumstances and needs, discussion of a solution, outlining costs and benefits, confirmation of proposals, follow-up, acceptance or decline.

At each of these points, your team has an opportunity to impress. A team member may convey empathy and build confidence, or they may not. They may appear enthusiastic and capable, or they may not. How can you monitor this important performance indicator without an efficient centralised system for capturing and monitoring the conversion of enquiries to instructions?

This uncertainty can present a problem for senior management, who may have a hunch or anecdotal evidence that one department is better at conversion that another, but they may not be clear exactly where in the process the weaknesses are.

Ideally you need to know, for each department:

  • how many enquiries they receive;
  • where these come from;
  • how many become an instruction; and
  • if the firm is not instructed, why?

This is fairly basic management information, but given that enquiries enter a firm at so many points, it can be hard to capture and track this vital information. In a recent mystery shopping exercise with one law firm, an alarming seven out of 10 enquiries were lost along the way, for a variety of reasons.

This reminded me of the Swiss cheese model of accident causation – it likens human systems to multiple slices of Emmental cheese. The holes in the cheese represent individual weaknesses in the system, but a system failure (such as the loss of a potentially valuable client) occurs when all the holes in the cheese align, allowing the hazard to pass through unfettered.

Exploring your client experience from enquiry through to potential instruction can be a useful exercise to ensure that there are no holes in your firm’s approach to client care.

Sue Bramall is managing director of Berners Marketing and advises law firms in the UK and overseas

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Website delays
Sue Bramall
Friday, 22 February 2013

With a growing percentage of new enquiries arriving via solicitors’ websites these days, online is undoubtedly a law firm’s most valuable marketing tool.

Whether you are starting a new practice and planning your first website, or contemplating an upgrade to your current site, it can be easy to underestimate the amount of time involved. Most parties involved (solicitors and designers) expect the design phase to take a long time. Solicitors tend not to work visually and so may find it difficult to brief a designer, but they know what they like when they see it, so this can involve a lot of trial and error.

The design process is ALSO complicated if a number of people need to be involved. How do you balance so many personal and subjective design choices without reaching a bland compromise? But this is not the hardest bit!

Once the design is signed off, programming begins and this can usually be accomplished in a matter of weeks. This is the period when the law firm needs to be working on the content, ready to be dropped into the beta site when it is delivered.

And this is where the project timetable can really fall apart. The reason is that because a website is such an all-encompassing representation of your firm, it forces you to think through big strategic questions, such as:

  • Who are we and how do we want to be perceived?
  • Who are our target clients and what do they need from the site?
  • What is our range of services and how might this develop in the next few years?

In the current challenging economic environment, these questions are even more challenging than before.

There is little point in populating a newly designed website with out-of-date material which, if written a few years ago, probably did not have search engines in mind. Therefore there is often a substantial amount of content needed for new services sectors and new team members.

For anyone starting a new law firm, you need to convey your vision whilst giving the website room for your practice to grow.

Whilst partners often comment that it was helpful and useful to go through this thought process again when building a new website, it was rarely planned for as part of the process and it always takes longer than you think it will!

Sue Bramall is managing director of Berners Marketing and advises law firms in the UK and overseas

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Brand loyalty – and the ski-jacket owners’ club
Sue Bramall
Thursday, 31 January 2013

Recently I was presenting the results of a mystery shopping campaign, and as commonly happens, the issues of capturing accurate contact details and inadequate follow-up were discussed.

Two particular areas of weakness identified were the provision of contact information to the marketing team and failing to confirm costs in writing via an email. Some viewed asking for email addresses and follow-up as an aggressive sales technique, but it does not need to be aggressive and this can be addressed easily through training.

Some commented that it tends not to be a priority when you have enough work on. This misses the point that you may be leaving work on the table. What is the point of investing in a smart website and search engine optimisation, if you do not have a process to ensure such leads are followed up enthusiastically?

So where does the ski jacket come in?

Well, on my way back from the presentation there was a problem at London Bridge tube and so I decided to walk over the bridge and take the train from Monument. This detour proved rather expensive, as it resulted in a visit to Snow+Rock on my way. Spotting the ideal jacket for my holiday, I joined a queue of five people waiting to pay – each of whom, without hesitation, spelled out their email address to the assistant who had politely asked for it when offering to email a copy of their receipt.

These five customers (100% of the queue) clearly had no objection providing their personal contact details when asked, and it will surely be no surprise when they start to receive emails from Snow+Rock.

On hanging up my new jacket at home and removing the labels, I was bemused to find an invitation to join the Schöffel Owners’ Club, promising news, events, competitions and a magazine delivered to my door.

Well, we all know that Schöffel’s objective is to secure my brand loyalty and make sure that I purchase my next item of ski apparel from them too. But the quality of this approach (bringing to mind the Aston Martin Owners’ Club) was certainly appealing.

Whilst many still guard their privacy fiercely, the internet generation take a more relaxed view and expect to be marketed to. They know that you seek their brand loyalty. Failure to ensure you have their correct contact details and to follow-up appears unenthusiastic and uninterested. Is that how you wish to be perceived?

Sue Bramall is managing director of Berners Marketing and advises law firms in the UK and overseas

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Brand lessons from Claridge’s
Sue Bramall
Thursday, 17 January 2013

If you watched the recent series on BBC2, Inside Claridge’s, you may have asked yourself how they can possibly charge several thousand pounds for one night of accommodation. The Claridge’s brand has been built over many years on a philosophy of putting the guest first and providing exceptional service.

This was exemplified by the head of housekeeping who kept detailed records, including photographic evidence, of exactly how guests liked their rooms and other aspects of their stay. This included precisely how the bed should be made – blankets or duvets, softness of mattress or pillow – even preferences for the position of furniture.

If you have not watched the programme, I would urge you to do so, as there are at least three valuable lessons to be learned for any service provider.

First, exceptional service demands attention to detail, thorough knowledge of your clients and access to this information. In helping firms to develop their customer relationship systems, it is rare that we come across well-kept client information. Contact names are not often recorded completely or accurately, never mind information on family circumstances or business plans. What information do you need to anticipate the needs of your clients and provide exceptional service?

Second, the overall service experience is created by everyone in the team. The Claridge’s housekeeper is probably rarely seen by the guest, and yet she is undoubtedly worth her weight in gold. Lawyers often forget that clients may encounter many members of staff before they eventually meet their solicitor. Are all your staff aware of the standards of service expected at your firm? Are standards monitored and do staff receive training accordingly?

Third, a brand built on exceptional service commands a premium. In this case, Claridge’s is charging 10 times that of its rivals in London and yet it clearly enjoys fantastic loyalty from its guests.

When Steve Jobs started opening Apple stores in 2001, not only was the physical environment important, but so was the customer experience. At a retreat with the team, then Apple retail chief Ron Johnson asked everyone to describe the best customer experience that they had received. Most mentioned the Four Seasons or Ritz-Carlton hotel, so Johnson sent his first five store managers through the Ritz-Carlton training programme and came up with the idea of replicating that level of experience.

Too often law firms simply compare themselves with other legal professionals. But there is much to be learned from other industries and, as was the case with the Apple stores, a fresh perspective can give you that differentiating edge over the competition. Once you start to compete on the basis of price alone, it can only go one way. Whilst not everyone can be Claridge’s or Apple, they are fine brands to emulate if your strategy is based on service excellence.

Sue Bramall is managing director of Berners Marketing and advises law firms in the UK and overseas

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Marketing – a question of resources
Sue Bramall
Friday, 4 January 2013

Marketing costs are split between external disbursements such as advertising or web design, and time in developing and managing initiatives. How this time is resourced has long presented a challenge for law firms, but this becomes more acute in the face of large national brands.

It seems that there are three main choices:
• do it yourself in-house, sharing tasks amongst fee-earners;
• employ dedicated marketing staff; or
• contract out to an external provider.

In practice, there is usually a mix of these three resources and balancing that mix is a challenge in itself.

Relying solely on fee-earners may seem like the least-cost option, but there is the hidden cost of fees not earned whilst marketing is done. In addition, this approach tends to be rather ad hoc, moving initiatives forward only when fee-earners have time, rather than at the pace of the market. Many firms have pared their support teams to the bone during the recession and finding spare capacity to resource marketing is proving difficult when the market starts to pick up.

Few fee-earners have relevant marketing experience in the more technical activities such as commissioning a website, implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) system or launching an e-newsletter. Learning a whole new discipline can be very distracting from other potentially productive business development activities.

For firms of a certain size, the benefits of employing a marketing executive start to outweigh the costs, and many may take a first step with a junior appointment or promotion of an existing member of the admin team. The challenge here is to find someone with the right mix of skills - someone who can help shape the strategy and budget at the start of the year, but will be just as happy to update the CRM system or stuff envelopes for a mailshot.

As firms get larger and more sophisticated in their requirements they often look for someone with more experience who can help the management team drive the business forward. Historically, it has been hard to find someone who would stay a long time in such a role where typically there were few direct career prospects. The advent of alternative business structures will certainly create opportunities for effective business development directors.

When we get to the large firms, or a corporate, resources permit the employment of a marketing team, where you will have specialists in PR, web, social media, tenders, events, and so on. The structure allows fee-earners to focus on client work and face-to-face marketing, simply providing legal input to initiatives as required.

It is easy to see how scale can facilitate more focused and more efficient marketing. When you combine this with direct routes to market for the likes of the Co-operative, Saga or RAC via their members, then it becomes a very powerful combination that will be hard to compete with.

Sue Bramall is managing director of Berners Marketing and advises law firms in the UK and overseas

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Yielding the greatest return?
Sue Bramall
Tuesday, 18 December 2012

I had a meeting with a potential client last week and, rightly so, the partners asked me to quantify the expected return on investment to them on costs of a particular marketing activity.

Quantified measurable results is typically one of the judging criteria for marketing awards, and in judging submissions I have seen a wide variety of responses to this question. Answers range from website hits, downloads, requests, new contacts, meetings, opportunities and business won. But, surprisingly, usually less than half of the submissions quantified the new business that has been won as a result of new campaigns, some of which appear quite costly indeed.

Peter Drucker’s saying ‘what gets measured, gets managed’ is well-worn, but I often come across a real weakness in measuring return on investment in marketing and business development.

Often firms have only a fairly hazy knowledge of exactly where all their business comes from and how this differs by practice area. Problems often stem from the fact that the practice management system is not very user-friendly when it comes to capturing or reporting this sort of information. Also, I find receptionists and fee-earners surprisingly reluctant to ask the question ‘how did you hear of us?’.

Budget approval meetings often still include a debate about whether the Yellow Pages still has merit as an advertising medium or whether it is worth putting effort into submissions for the legal directories. Whilst a few partners can anecdotally recall at least one client who has come through the door that way, where are the firms that know:

  • how many enquiries they received from advertising in directories;
  • the percentage of those that were converted to clients; and
  • the total value of billings derived from those clients?

Without this information, how can you make meaningful decisions about whether or not the marketing budget has been well spent, and which activities you should repeat or drop next year?

However, I would caution against always dropping a new initiative which does not deliver new business immediately, if it is based upon sound business reasoning. For example, a sector-based marketing strategy can easily take a few years before a firm is recognised as a credible provider in a potentially new market. As one partner admitted last week, there can sometimes be a tendency to dismiss a marketing activity which does not yield immediate results.

Granted, many clients, particularly commercial ones, may come to your firm thorough a variety of contact points over a potentially lengthy period of time and it can be difficult to pin success to one activity. However, a customer relationship management system will allow you to record all these activities and help your track progress over time, demonstrating that a mix of marketing activity is required.

With so many practice management systems available in the legal market, it seems hard to find one which is really effective in this regard. I fear I will now be inundated with approaches by software suppliers now, and loud cries of ‘rubbish in – rubbish out!’.

Sue Bramall is director of Berners Marketing and former head of business development at Pinsent Masons

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Focus on value proposition
Sue Bramall
Thursday, 4 October 2012

Law firm marketing is often seen as the department which does the brochures, the website and runs events. It is relatively rare that the marketing team is consulted in areas such as pricing, but all a firm’s effort and expenditure on promotion may amount to nothing if the solicitor receiving an enquiry fails to communicate the value in the service which he or she is proposing to provide.

I often get to see how well this part of the client experience is performed when reviewing mystery shopping reports, where we look at how clearly the costs were explained, whether the mystery client felt they understood the value in the service being offered and the payment terms and options.

Potential clients are often left confused, uncertain or unclear about the benefits or risks in proceeding.

I recently reviewed a letter offering to give advice on inheritance tax planning. It had evidently been typed from a dictation, as the stream of explanation regarding a number of cost options was part of one very long paragraph. It was rather tricky to follow, when a table setting out options A, B and C would have been the ideal presentation. But more worryingly, nowhere did the letter explain that whilst the costs amounted to over £1,000, the amount that might be safeguarded from the Treasury or the local council care service amounted to a few hundred thousand pounds.

Earlier this year, the Legal Ombusdman published a useful guide for lawyers entitled An ombudsman’s view of good costs service. It includes a range of complaints which have passed across their desks, illustrating how lack of clarity in how costs information is provided can lead to problems at a later stage. Pricing is an important part of the marketing mix, and as competition intensifies in the legal marketplace it is important to ensure that your value proposition, pricing strategy and price communications do not let you down.

Letting the marketing team review your costs proposals could identify some simple improvements in presentation which might clarify things for your clients and reduce risks later on. Many firms are starting to get to grips with alternative fee arrangements such as fixed fees, but particular care is needed in communicating how risk is apportioned in these. Our American cousins are a long way ahead of us in this regard and this is a subject for another blog I suspect.

Few lawyers receive training in pricing strategies and negotiation, as do even fewer receptionists and junior assistants and yet they are often handling enquiries to quite an advanced stage. Filtering potential time-wasters from good clients is an important skill, but it is worth checking that your receptionist is not responding to all calls with a terse: 'Mr X does not give free advice. He charges £200 + VAT per hour and we need £500 upfront before a consultation,' as we encountered recently.

Sue Bramall is director of Berners Marketing and former head of business development at Pinsent Masons

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