How to plan your marketing during times of a slowing market

There’s no doubt about it, proper planning prevents poor performance. Meticulous preparation is required to improve your chances of securing a successful outcome for your clients in their legal matter, and the same goes for your social media marketing efforts if you wish to ensure that your investment yields a return.

As a legal practice, the last thing you want is for any time or resources to be wasted on perfunctory marketing efforts.

In order to ensure your social media marketing generates results, you will need to strategically approach the following five planning considerations:

1. What are your business priorities for the financial year and how can social media help you achieve these? For example, if your business priority is to let more people know about who you are and what you do, then social media can help you achieve this by helping you to be more visible and using your content to demonstrate how you can help people.
2. Who is your target audience? Who is it that you are trying to communicate with via your social media channels? You are not going to be relevant to everyone, so who is it that your services are most suited to? For example, if your firm specialises in commercial services such as succession planning, business structuring or employment contracts, then you may identify that small or medium business owners are who you want to target on LinkedIn. If you specialise in conveyancing, you may want to target real estate agents or first home buyers.
3. How would you like to position your firm in the minds of this target audience? Would you like to be perceived as established experts within a particular field? Or perhaps you would like to be differentiated from other ‘typical law firms’ by positioning yourselves as tech savvy and innovative. Your social media content and channel selection will need to reflect this.
4. How can you add value to your target audience via your social media channels? Why should people connect with you on LinkedIn or follow your Facebook page? What’s in it for them? A small heads up, your sales and promotional messages are not the reason they will join your social communities. You can easily add value to your specified target audience by posting helpful blog articles about legislative updates or even posting answers to some of your most frequently asked questions by existing clients.
5. How will you measure your success? At a minimum, the metrics that you can access via the insights functionality of all the major social media marketing platforms include reach (how many people were exposed to your content), engagement (how many people clicked on, liked, commented or shared your social media posts), video views, website clicks, downloads, lead generations and sales.Choosing which metric to measure the success of your social media efforts will of course relate to your initial social media marketing objectives. For example, if your social media marketing objective was to get in front of more people and tell them about who you are and what you do – then measuring your contents reach will be your measurement. If your objective is to drive people from social media to your firm’s website, then you will measure website clicks generated from your social media posts.

When used effectively, social media channels (particularly LinkedIn and Facebook) can be instrumental in achieving some of your marketing objectives. You can add value to your target audience by producing regular, relevant and helpful content. Additionally, it’s recommended that you have a clear understanding of how social media marketing can help to add value to your organisation.

Measuring your progress on a monthly basis and making adjustments as required, will ensure that time and resources spent on the platform are optimised for success.