Solo Practice

Marketing Begins with Your ?Product? - PART ONE: Identify a Problem

By Garrett Worley

Ask most lawyes about marketing and they’ll talk about advertising, building client relationships, community outreach, word of mouth and other methods of promotion. But these are really just the final steps of the process. Any good marketing strategy should begin with defining your product–the unique legal services you offer to clients.

The following is the first of an eight-part series on solo and small firm marketing that will include identifying problems, providing solutions, packaging, pricing analysis, competitor analysis, creating a unique value proposition, branding and outbound marketing.

PART ONE: Identify a Problem

The first step of the marketing process is to identify a problem. This seems simple enough, but it’s often overlooked. Lawyers solve legal problems, but legal problems is too broad a term to be of much use. Many lawyers focus on a particular practice area, but this too fails to adequately identify a problem specific enough to build a marketing strategy around. For example, business law problems, while more specific than legal problems, is still a fairly broad field with plenty of competition. It’s difficult to stand out from the crowd in such a wide market.

The idea is to change your perspective. Instead of considering practice areas and specialties, consider potential clients and the problems they face. Continuing with the business law example, stop thinking in terms of legal issues and start thinking in terms of problems that businesses confront. For example, even with insurance, a business owner may be liable for accidents that occur on her premises. Premises liability is a clearly defined problem and is specific enough for effective marketing.

That’s not to say you should become a specialist and limit your practice to focus on one problem. The point is that you will design a solution for each problem and market that solution rather than marketing your entire practice.

How does a solo or small firm find problems to solve? Asking your clients is the best way. Another idea is to join forums and discussion boards associated with your practice area. These will contain a number of specific problems for which you can craft solutions. Community organizations, such as the Chamber of Commerce, are another excellent way to spot the common legal problems your potential clients encounter. The type of law you practice will determine how you identify problems. What matters most is that you get a clear picture from the client’s perspective.

This concept isn’t revolutionary. Successful businesses have been marketing their solutions (rather than their companies) for years. P&G doesn’t market itself as a multinational conglomerate much–it markets Crest toothpaste, Folgers coffee, Bounty paper towels and hundreds of other products as solutions to consumers’ problems.

In future posts I’ll discuss how to design and market a legal ‘product’ to solve clients’ problems. To create a sound marketing plan, though, you’ll first need to build a strong foundation by applying the basic principles outlined above to identify the specific problems to be solved.

Full post as published by Garrett Worley's Blawg on January 22, 2008 (boomark / email).