Yesterday I was in Manchester (which was sunny and warm if you want to know) delivering another of the CLT training sessions on “Developing a privately funded family law practice” with 19 enthusiastic family law practitioners.
During the day we covered the planning cycle and development of an appropriate business development strategy, some guidelines for motivating the entire family team to get involved in marketing as well as considering a wide range of marketing, business development, relationship management and selling techniques.
Every time I run a session like this, it strikes me how different things grab people’s imagination. And yesterday was no different. The main areas of interest that the delegates reported back to me at the end of the day were:
• Planning – The need to develop an in-depth understanding of the fast changing family law market, creative approaches to segmentation in urban and rural, wealthy and poorer markets and to explore the use of technology to support aspects of commoditisation for both service efficiency and to reduce costs.
• Brand – The tough challenge of differentiation and some of the innovative ways that family law practitioners have found to package up and extend their services or identify unusual niches to help them develop effective personal and firm brands.
• Social media – Particularly the way that tools like LinkedIn, Twitter and blogging link together with established marketing tools for reputation management such as thought leadership and media relations into integrated promotional campaigns – as well as supporting SEO.
• Relationship management – Developing a focused (based on sound analyses of the client base, source of work and local market) and structured approach to developing relationships with referrers whether they are past clients or intermediaries such as accountants and IFAs.
You might want to also take a look at my blog post of 15th December 2009 on “Marketing a family law practice” and the more recent post on 7th August 2010 on “Private client marketing to High Net Worths”.
