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Marketing increasingly critical as post-pandemic world approaches
As the age of coronavirus continues, legal businesses must not only ensure they stay the course with marketing plans, but ensure relevant professionals have a seat at the table to ensure the ongoing success of said businesses.
Jerome Doraisamy
When COVID-19 hit earlier this year, marketing professionals were arguing that, more so now than ever, law firms need to be visible for clients in the wake of rising uncertainty and unpredictability.
Speaking last week on The Lawyers Weekly Show, Ms Moore – who is the director of Create Design & Marketing – said that marketing is often seen as a discretionary expense, particularly in turbulent times, and while immediate impacts from cutting it may not be seen, but months down the track, real cracks start to appear.
“Cracks are what organisations typically look for marketing to gloss over, but the difference now is that the cracks are very exposed and they’re exposed to the public and to consumers,” she warned.
What Ms Moore thus did, when some of her clients tried to pull out of marketing arrangements at the outbreak of COVID-19, was force them to keep those plans in place.
“The good thing about staying the course is it means that by changing your scope, changing your expectation, it challenges the marketing department or marketing agency that you're working with to be more astute, to be more in tune and to be far more engaging with your market,” she argued.
Marketing can no longer be seen by law firms as discretionary spending, Ms Moore continued – “it requires organisations to really assess who they are, what they do and to whom”.
“Even though they're really basic questions, if you ask different management or executive team members you'll get different answers. My recommendation would be very much to take a step back and really determine those areas: work out your who, what, when, where and why, but lead with the why, like why are you doing this and to whom does it serve?” she added.
“A lot of the time in these types of environments, it's a very natural response for companies just to list their services like, ‘We can do this and this is how we can help’, and so on and so forth but they don't really determine how that benefits the client. What I challenge firms to do right now is to take that step back and say, ‘What is my discipline? Am I a specialist in this particular area?’ Or, ‘If we're not, what particular services do we have and where is our specialty in those services?’ And then make it very clear what problems or opportunities your firm is then resolving.”
Moreover, the marketing professional and/or team should be “sitting at the table” with the leadership of a firm, Ms Moore advised, being privy to “the uncomfortable discussions”.
“Not that they necessarily have a voice in that, but just to be across the business. Because what they can then do is to permeate the appropriate messages not only internally, but externally, and to your point, everyone has to be coming from the same hymn sheet. So, unless everybody is having a consistent viewpoint then your message is going to be lost,” she said.
In August of this year, Mel Telecican and Louise Sparkes Howarth appeared on The Boutique Lawyer Show to discuss how best SME law firms can be marketing themselves at this critical juncture. More recently, entrepreneur Amanda Rose wrote that the best marketing for law firms doesn’t feel like marketing.
To listen to the full conversation with Sascha Moore, click below:
Jerome Doraisamy
Jerome Doraisamy is the editor of Lawyers Weekly and HR Leader. He has worked at Momentum Media as a journalist on Lawyers Weekly since February 2018, and has served as editor since March 2022. In June 2024, he also assumed the editorship of HR Leader. Jerome is also the author of The Wellness Doctrines book series, an admitted solicitor in NSW, and a board director of the Minds Count Foundation.
You can email Jerome at:
