Law firms should fully outsource marketing to improve business development

Private practice lawyers should be profoundly comfortable with the concept of outsourcing. Every time we receive an instruction, it is because a client recognises that he needs a service which is outside his area of competence or that his time is better spent on another matter. But, for some reason, we sometimes hesitate to outsource marketing work to specialists.

Until seven months ago, we had kept our marketing function in-house. The experience of fully outsourcing this has been entirely positive – producing a significant cost saving and driving an increase in instructions. Why was the decision not taken earlier to outsource our marketing? There are a number of reasons, none of which stand scrutiny.

The first can be traced back to the way that lawyers are hardwired to think in terms of chargeable hours. We cannot bill a client for time spent on marketing, so we undervalue marketing to the point of suspecting a consultancy cannot offer value for money in the same way that our own, more granular, services do.

The second (linked) point is that marketing spend is discretionary. For most, this has been a tough economy and holding back on non-compulsory external spend is much easier than making internal cuts.

Then there is the argument that one cannot and should not outsource the responsibility for growing the business – that, as professionals, we far too often bury ourselves in narrow cognitive tasks and must therefore be forced to leave our comfort zones.

However, none of these reasons for keeping marketing in-house stands up to scrutiny.

Case for change

I first realised that we needed to outsource our marketing function when I understood that the pace of technical change posed an insurmountable challenge to smaller in-house marketing functions. The digitisation of marketing is a reality for firms of all sizes and practice changes fast. As with any fast-changing area of law, only a specialist can keep pace.

Pre-outsourcing, marketing in our five fee-earner firm accounted for up to 20 per cent of our £1m-plus turnover – which included the salaries of two marketing staff and expenditure to a PR agency to redesign our website. This eventually led us to outsource many aspects of our marketing to its subsidiary, DAA Marketing.

It became clear that an effective website is closely tied to all other aspects of marketing and that these in turn had been drawn into the fast-changing IT side. Techniques employed to optimise the website’s hits for potential clients include a continual change and review of keywords and content that may lead clients to the site. Paid-for click-throughs from search engines are also important and the profiles of web-users who visit our website are reviewed to ensure the search terms we pay for are the right ones.

Investment challenges

We are buying expertise, rather than an off-the-shelf product. However, I still invest a significant amount of time in our marketing strategy. That investment started with the brief to the agency: I needed to be clear about our business strategy, to know which income streams are central to our business and which client profiles we need to attract.

For example, do we want to draw in new clients or to sell more services to existing clients? Should we narrow our appeal? The aim of our marketing strategy is to differentiate ourselves – that difference is reflected in our brief, not the consultancy’s expertise or market knowledge.

There is also an ongoing time commitment. This involves a fortnightly review meeting, including a report on web traffic and the points that are driving interest in the firm and our services. That data is invaluable, but it comes at a price – surprising, this turned out to be 40 to 50 per cent below our previous marketing spend.

The next step

Despite the tough market, our business is growing and we can identify significant parts of growth that have come from the marketing changes made. Discretionary spend has been an easy ‘sell’ internally.

We are now considering the logical next step of outsourcing: management of our client events – and with them, the headache of invites, acceptances and venue booking. Another key benefit is a thorough analysis of client data from events and links with other collected data, creating further opportunities for business development.