LAW FIRMS: EVER ATTRACTED NEW CLIENTS AND BOOSTED YOUR BUSINESS PRESENCE WITH THESE PROFESSIONAL PRINT MARKETING AND ADVERTISING IDEAS AND SOLUTIONS?

Is your marketing working hard and working smart for your law firm? To gain more business presence, brand awareness, leads, conversions, and sales? If you haven’t done a marketing audit lately, opportunities may be passing you by. Read on for some print marketing ideas to refresh your professional standing and business presence.

Legal sector overview

In 2020, 16,393 or 2 out of 3 solicitors in Australia were in private practice, 80% of whom practise alone (source: The Law Street Journal of NSW). Solo and small law firms may have lower budgets than corporate or government legal departments to prioritise print marketing solutions. Yet they can still apply value-for-money print marketing ideas to increase their professional standing, and distinguish themselves to grow their business.
Australia’s law firms have emerged stronger from the global COVID-19 pandemic. Perth leads post-COVID recovery with 7.6% growth in FY2021, and a robust profit margin of 36.8%. The Australian legal sector posted a 7% increase in profit between 2020 and 2021, with 4 out of 5 firms posting stable or rising profits. Annual demand for legal services has grown in the last five

financial years, bucking negative trends in the US, UK and Asia.

Interesting aspects of current trends and demand in the Australian legal sector include:

• The 2021 Australia State of the Legal Market report suggests that the areas of law with the highest practice demand are dispute resolution, insolvency and restructuring, banking and finance, real estate, and workplace relations.
• The same report reveals that the highest demand in law talent in a COVID-adapted world are for employment and workplace safety, property and real estate, and mergers and acquisitions.

What does all this mean for law firms?

There is ongoing demand for legal services, so law firms will do well to review and spruce up their marketing presence and brand credibility for their maximum benefit.

• Conduct a marketing audit to find out if you are getting the maximum leverage you can from your marketing spend.
• First impressions count, and there are many ways to create positive experiences or touchpoints  in a potential client’s buyer journey.

Five great questions to start with are:

1. How do I get more people to be aware that my business exists?
2. How do I establish myself as a legal subject matter expert?
3. When people visit me for the first time, do my office and I create strong positive first impressions?
4. How do I make it easy for people to form and nurture ongoing favourable impressions of my business before, during, and after I provide legal services?
5. How do people maintain a positive top-of-mind recall of my business, so they will think of me when they need legal services?

Print marketing tools give you answers to all the above questions, and can make a big difference in establishing professionalism and trustworthiness.

How do print marketing and advertising add value to law firms?

Tangibility builds trust. Particularly in an industry like the legal sector where integrity is key, and law firms must comply with strict advertising guidelines.

Most of the information handled by law firms is sensitive, confidential, or complex. Lawyers need to ensure their advertising is not false, misleading, deceptive, offensive, illegal, or likely to bring the profession into disrepute. More than most other industries, law firms must show, and not just claim, that they can provide excellent legal services.

How do you demonstrate and showcase your legal prowess? There is a wide range of print marketing solutions that can help law firms achieve the following business outcomes ethically, with impartiality and integrity:

• Help people find the right lawyer for them
• Nurture prospects by empowering with information
• Increase market presence and credibility
• Create and sustain excellent client relationships
• Provide appropriate customer-centric cross-selling
• Add value to their community

Despite widespread digitalisation, recent statistics suggest that print marketing and advertising are still effective as marketing tools. These encouraging results provide confidence that print marketing can reap great results for law firms too:

• Boosts campaign effectiveness by 400% when combined with digital ads.
• Creates strong brand recall of 77% vs 46% for digital ads.
• Trusted by 82% of consumers when making a purchase decision.
• 80% of customers act on direct mailer ads, which is 37% higher than for email.

29 ways print marketing and advertising solutions create positive business outcomes for law firms

A key business promotion strategy is to create memorable branded touch points associated with your legal services. A touchpoint is any time anyone is exposed to some aspect of your business—before, during or after they buy from you.

You can create memorable touchpoints with cost-effective print marketing and advertising solutions. Display a strong and consistent brand presence at every touchpoint to increase awareness and recall.

Here are a few great examples of where and when print marketing can help you showcase your legal firm, at different phases of the buyer journey, to achieve different marketing objectives. For ease of reference, they are categorised under the five questions (A to E) posed above.

(A) Increase awareness

Marketing starts with letting people know you exist. There are various ways to do so that comply with requirements in law firm advertising. Marketing advice for law first tends to talk about digital strategies like Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), but don’t forget that your brand presence in real life has to follow through from the impressions made online. Professional print marketing is vital as it provides valuable experiences at multiple touchpoints. Combine digital and print marketing to get the best results.

Print solutions for increasing brand awareness: