Are We Big Enough to Need a Marketing Department?

The title, “Are We Big Enough to Need a Marketing Department?,” is a question I’m often asked by smaller and mid-sized firms. Larger firms will ask, “How many people do we need in our marketing department?” Neither is the right question to be asking.

The “right answer” to your marketing staffing needs is in fact two more questions: what do you want to achieve and how quickly do you want to see results? 

If you’re a large, recently merged firm that needs to promote its new name widely and quickly, you need a lot of creative horsepower—for a short period of time. Then you need a sound strategy for the future and a small but experienced in-house marketing crew that has the resources to go outside for help as needed. 

A mid-sized firm that’s done a good job of developing business, but not much to build firm profile, might realize that it needs to vault to the next level. For a while, its profile-building efforts might rival those of its larger competitors and might swamp its in-house marketing resources. 

A small firm with no in-house marketing department and neighbouring competition snapping at its heels may, with guidance, take a long, hard look at its positioning. Its resulting strategic plan might put larger competitors to shame. 

In the above scenarios, the size of the in-house marketing department has very little bearing on the success of the firms’ marketing initiatives. The secrets of success? How closely each firm is prepared to examine its needs and wants and whether it is willing to put in place the right resources to get results. 

In hiring their first marketing person, most firms staff for what they currently do. Someone’s got to organize the golf tournament and the client holiday party and order the pens. Susie on reception can do that, can’t she? But then the website needs updating: who do we hire for that? And we need new business cards, but the old ones were a bit dated—maybe we need a new look, who do we hire for that? You end up with a mismatch of assorted helpers and service providers, none of whom has any direction about what the firm is trying to achieve—because the firm doesn’t know.

So often, law firm marketing discussions start something like this: “Billings are down, we should be doing more marketing” or “The associates aren’t busy, they should be marketing themselves” or “We need to grow the firm, we have to get out there and market.” Nothing wrong with these as a starting place, but often that’s where they finish, too.

When you know what you’re aiming for, you can decide what help you need to get there. Start with your client list: who are your top 25 clients? What industries are they in? What’s in their future? Who referred them to you? An exercise like this can produce surprising results. I asked one client to list their top five referral sources and they were sure they knew who they were—financial advisors, accountants, other clients, etc. They were very surprised when their number one referral source turned out to be—other lawyers. That made a big difference to the resulting marketing plan. 

The key marketing appointment is the leader of the firm’s marketing initiatives, regardless of whether that person is a lawyer in the firm, a staff person, or a consultant. Get the right person leading the charge and every other staffing decision will fall into place. 

In mid-size and small firms, the person leading the marketing charge is often a lawyer or the firm administrator. Too often, the discussion around the management table goes like this: “Harry’s practice is dropping off, let’s put him in charge of marketing” or “Joan’s great, she’s handled the computer project and the office renovations, she’s got billing under control, maybe she can do the marketing as well?” Harry may have lost his drive and Joan is obviously swamped: how good will they be at marketing the firm? It isn’t a question of background or experience in marketing: the essentials for a marketing leader are to have a keen understanding of their clients’ needs, the firm’s strengths, and a drive to make the firm successful. 

In my next column, I’ll discuss the “Rent or buy?” decision in staffing marketing initiatives.